Poetry in the Age of

Consumer-Generated Content
Craig Dworkin

“Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.”

—Kurt Cobain1

In the last years of the twentieth century, a soi-disant “conceptual writ-

ing” seemed newly relevant because of the way it read against the contem-
poraneous emergence of database-driven cultures of surveillance, finance,
and communication. Although it was not necessarily published online and
did not exploit the advantages of computational analysis or pursue the af-
fordances of digital tools, such work could be considered new media poetry
because it exhibited the structural logic of the database. Adhering to Lev
Manovich’s definition of “the new media avant-garde,” this first-phase
conceptualism privileged methods of accessing, organizing, and visualiz-
ing large quantities of previously accumulated data, rather than creating
original material or pioneering novel styles.2 To be sure, the reign of the
database is still in the ascendant, but the underlying technical structure
of the internet—not to mention its cultural semantics—has changed. Ac-
cordingly, one way to map the development of conceptual writing over the

Thanks to Virginia Jackson, Ilan Manouach, Simon Morris, Marjorie Perloff, Katie Price,
and Jonathan Stalling, who gave me the opportunity to test some of these arguments in pub-
lic, and to Amanda Hurtado, Paul Stephens, and Danny Snelson, who continue to encourage
and challenge and inform and inspire me. This essay is for Al Filreis, who reminded me to
care. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nevermind (DGCD-24425, 1991).
2. Quoted in Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” The New Media Reader,
ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 22. See also
Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). I elaborate this argument
about conceptual writing in Craig Dworkin, “The Imaginary Solution,” Contemporary Literature
48 (Spring 2007): 29–60.

Critical Inquiry 44 (Summer 2018)

© 2018 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/18/4404-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

674
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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 675
course of the last two decades would be to attend to how certain works come
into dialogue with their changing cultural background—establishing feed-
back loops of reflexive resonance with nonpoetic texts and structures—
while others, accordingly, fall out of sync. If the texts of first-phase concep-
tualism aligned with the early internet in fraught ways, certain recent
works exploit both the themes and forms at the heart of the social-media
networks that predominate in and structure online culture today, and they
signify with heightened urgency as a result of those congruencies.
Consider, for instance, the distance between two passages, published
over a decade apart:

undeviated, unaccountably, undaunted, unmurmuringly, unim-

pressed, uncertain, untouched, unwinding, unmanned, unless,
unfrequented, unvarying, unearthly, unappalled, unaccompanied,
unprovided, undignified, unless, unwinding, undertaker, unprin-
cipled, under, uncertain, unknown, unknown,

unexpected, unite, unknown, unmisgiving, unfrequently, unener-

vated, undue, unconditional, unsettling, uncertain, unseen, unless,
undeviating, unerringly, unheeded, unearthed, unless, unmo-
mentous, under, unprovided, unusual, untrackably, uncommon,
unrigged, unhinged, unspeckled, unyielding, untottering, under,
unearthly, unsounded, under, unsuspecting, undiscoverable,
under, unastonished, unharmed, under, unintermitted, unrest-
ingly, unabated, unprecedented, under, unseen, unfearing, unseen,
unmindful, uncommon, untraceable

untouched, unconquerable, under, unmeasured, under, underling,

uncertain, unchangeable, under, uncommonly, unpitying, unpre-
pared, ungraduated, unappeasable, under, unwinking, under,
unsurrendered, uncracked, unconquering, undulated, unharming.3

Flush feverish stepping laying respectfully addressing impressed re

gift emptier ore correctly exasperating thankful disregarding profit-

3. Judith Goldman, “Dicktée,” Vocoder (New York, 2001), p. 54.

Craig D workin is professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the

author of No Medium (2013) and serves as Senior Founding Editor to the
Eclipse Archive at eclipsearchive.org

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676 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
ing irregular scissors sharpening sharpened knife scissor preferring
sharpen some-time humble reels eloquent adequate spirituality
transcending solving intelligible enjoyable intensified demonstrat-
ing origin noisily drearily joyously boisterously despondingly frag-
mentarily roughly energetically repeatedly funnily hesitatingly
dreamily doubtingly tilling boastingly delightfully touchingly
quaintly flatly transparent trunk tenderly uninteresting daintily
ruined jumping landing distance desolating jumped jump frighten
exchanging explanations astonishes doubtful quarrelsome talkative
breathless thank toss tossed rhythm regularity struck fully minding
uninterested contradicting smelled gloominess noise noises disgust
displease unlike buried everyday expository recognising regretted
HISTORY A FAMILY’S PROGRESS similar similarly.4
Both texts sort vocabulary from famously lengthy American novels. The
first comes from the conclusion to Judith Goldman’s “Dicktée” and results
from an attempt to sequentially record every word in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick beginning with un. The second comes from the conclusion to
Holly Melgard’s The Making of the Americans and results from an attempt
to distill a version of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in which
only the first occurrence of words and punctuation is permitted. While
Goldman’s poem exemplifies an algorithmic imagination perfectly suited
to the computer programmed filtering of a digital database, it was in fact
composed longhand. Melgard’s poem, in turn, might conceivably have
been composed by hand, but the scale of the project speaks to what results
when the conceptualist impulse behind a work like Goldman’s poem en-
counters the affordances of scripting languages such as Perl and Python.
If, from a sufficient distance, the literary differences between such works
appear insignificant, a more focused look at the specifics of their economic
and technologic cultural context, and the minute particulars of their modes
of production and distribution, provides us with a means of distinguishing
their divergent significations.
If nothing else, the configurations of the World Wide Web have morphed
over the period that separates the two texts. In the broadest terms, the
Web has become less static and humanly curated and less focused on dis-
cretely structured databases. Although the fundamental technologies have
not changed as starkly as a nomenclature like Web 2.0 would suggest, one
can track the developments that have made the typical internet browsing

4. Holly Melgard, The Making of the Americans (Buffalo, N.Y., 2015), pp. 23–24.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 677
experience more algorithmic, interoperable, ephemeral, mobile, affective,
and narcissistic.5
To begin with, one might note those general trends that can be correlated
to a change in the ratio of users to content creators. In fact, the very distinc-
tion between the two has begun to blur, since what used to count as use itself
now qualifies as the creation of content. Concurrently, users have increas-
ingly become the products rather than the clients of internet businesses.
In the case of something like Facebook, for instance, one does not go to
the site for the special content generated or curated by Facebook’s experts;
rather, one goes to the site to see what other users have written and clicked
and to create content for them, reciprocally, by posting and commenting in
turn. In the process, users’ activities and data are commodified. Although we
may imagine ourselves as customers consuming the product of Facebook’s
platform, our data, harvested as we use the site, is the actual product sold by
the company; our individual visits to the company’s web pages are among
the initial stages in a commercial economy rather than its final transaction.
Similarly, one does not so much google something, as one is googled in the
process; again, Google’s business model is predicated less on providing cus-
tomers with data than on gathering their data as raw material. This relay is a
specific example of the general condition diagnosed by Tiqqun wherein con-
sumers have themselves become commodified.6 Both the object and the
subject of advertising, this second-degree consumption (a consumption of
consumption) reifies human relations—such as the network of social media
“friends”—as commodities, which are already understood in the Marxist
tradition as negotiating and defining social relations. In the resultant mise-
en-abîme, one discovers “rapports humains qui masquent des rapports
marchands qui masquent des rapports humains [human relations that mask
market relations that mask human relations].”7
Two measurable benchmarks in webpage architecture corroborate this
change in online business models. First, the number of hyperlinks point-
ing to external domains has decreased. Instead, one finds increasing num-
bers of links to other pages within the same domain or to an embedded
element loaded within a single portal page.8 Second, the number of

5. See Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy, “Key Differences between Web
1.0 and Web 2.0,” First Monday 13 (June 2008), firstmonday.org/article/view/2125/1972
6. See Tiqqun [collective], Premiers Matériaux pour une théorie de la jeune fille (Paris,
2001).
7. Ibid., p. 78.
8. See Mark Tremayne, “Applying Network Theory to the Use of External Links on News
Web Sites,” in Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Medium, ed. Xigen Li
(Mahwah, N.J., 2010), pp. 49–64.

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678 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
account-creation and login requirements to use a site or to access a page
has increased. Both instances are evidence that the new business models
do not so much require selling a product to users as they depend on keep-
ing users on the site, recording their data and commercializing their pres-
ence. Further indication of this mutation can be read at a scripting level.
The promiscuity of file formats across platforms is possible because of
the dynamic interaction of multiple databases through public Application
Program Interfaces (APIs), those protocol specifications that allow vari-
ous software components to interact with one another. For example, a
YouTube video might be embedded in a Facebook page, allowing a user
to watch it without leaving one site for the other. Or a search engine that
has been queried for the name of a business chain might return its usual
summary of webpage results as well as automatically generating an inter-
active map of the nearby franchise locations with proximity to the user’s
server, overlaying real-time traffic information with estimated travel times.
Indeed, one could also look to the changed status of the unit of the page
itself as an HTML construct. Those changes in promiscuous scripting were
enabled by the coordination of technologies, such as AJAX and XHR, that
permit the separation of dataflow from page presentation, so that parts of
an HTML page can be dynamically exchanged without the entire page, as a
single object, being trashed and refreshed wholesale.9
Concurrently, the structure of web pages themselves and the ways in
which their designs organize information have accommodated those dy-
namic, asynchronous communications between multiple off-site data-
bases. In the 1990s, interfaces tended to present a uniform and stateless
view of the site. That is, a website looked the same regardless of who ac-
cessed it, and it would look the same—unless there had been an explicitly
authored owner update—if it were called it up again the next day or the
next year. Today, in contrast, many sites present different information, and
different pathways to linked pages within a site, depending on the naviga-
tion histories and activities of each unique user in relation to others. These
newer web pages display data “related to items you’ve viewed” or “inspired
by your shopping trends” (to take phrases from Amazon.com). The con-

9. See Cornelia Györödi et al., “Web 2.0 Technologies with JQuery and Ajax,” Computer
Technology and Computer Programming: Research and Strategies, ed. James L. Antonakos (Boca
Raton, Fla., 2011), pp. 99–110. The application program interface XMLHttpRequest (XHR)
employs web-browser scripting languages in order to send a request to a server and load the
server response data back into the script for responsive display without having to reload the
web page; the client-side application Asynchronous Java Script and XML (AJAX) uses an
XHR object in order to transfer variously formatted data with server-side scripts, communi-
cating in both directions without altering the overall display of a web page.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 679
tent of categories such as “recommendations for you in books” or “custom-
ers who bought this item also bought” changes with every click the user
makes and with every click every other user of the site makes as well.
One final development worth noting has to do with how search engines
themselves have changed as they navigate the Web. As Richard Rogers dem-
onstrates, the decade between 1997 and 2007 encompasses an evolution of
search engine architecture which promotes algorithmic processes and au-
tomated procedures while reducing human-curated indices.10 Following
Rogers, one can trace this change in both in the front-end design of menu
choices and options for how users search, as well as in the back-end me-
chanics of the actual search mechanisms and logic processing. Ask Jeeves
provides a perfect object lesson. Founded in 1996, the company tried to cap-
italize on Web search queries and other questions answered, as they pub-
licized, by real people (hinting at the pressure the internet’s automating in-
terface had already put on the notion of the simulation of unreal people). By
2006, however, Jeeves—like a character from Downton Abbey—had “re-
tired,” and the parent company left the search engine business altogether
in 2010 in the face of Google’s algorithmic search dominance. A related
symptom of this same transformation can be gleaned from the lost Web
of static lists: owner-added links; hand-posted blog rolls; guest-curated
top-ten lists. These artifacts of deliberate, individual human selection have
now been largely replaced by dynamically generated galleries of targeted ad-
vertisements, statistically related searches, automatically linked socially net-
worked profiles, and the whole host of data sorted and rendered by prob-
abilistic algorithms and automated scripting sequences.
The replacement of the consciously curated Web by a more automa-
tized, algorithmically driven network mirrors the evolution of the financial
markets alongside which it has developed in the modern information econ-
omy. The investment market segment of that economy has been adapting
to the realization that the curatorial choices of professional money manag-
ers and actively managed funds could not outperform randomly indexed
big-data sampling of the market as a whole. Recognizing the significance
of this paradigm shift, Paul Stephens has written with keen insight about
“strategies of passive indexing” in the economic world of big data and its
correlation to conceptual writing practices.11 Stephens illustrates the self-
reflexive relationship between a certain mode of conceptual poetry and

10. See Richard Rodgers, Digital Methods (Cambridge, Mass., 2013).

11. Paul Stephens, “Vanguard Total Index: Conceptual Writing, Information Asymmetry,
and the Risk Society,” Contemporary Literature 54 (Winter 2013): 753.

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680 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
“the conditions of its own existence and dissemination in an era of instan-
taneous global information flows,” contextualizing the ways in which the
indexical forms taken by so many works of conceptual literature point both
to source materials and to the embeddedness of those materials in a chang-
ing global economy of privatized risk.12 Following Stephens’s lead, we might
note three other areas in which technological, economic, and literary trends
overlap: affect, junkspace, and platform.
In economic terms, emotional or affective labor was first formally ana-
lyzed in the 1970s by Italian autonomist writers and developed by postoper-
aismo theorists such as Maurizio Lazzarato as one aspect of lavoro imma-
teriale (“immaterial” or “invisible” labor),13 or what feminist sociologists
would come to materialize as labor in the “bodily mode.”14 The explicit in-
tegration of such emotionally signifying activities into the commercial
sphere has come to be seen as an constitutive stage in postwar economic
development. Positing that production becomes industrialized and then in-
dustrialization becomes informationalized, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri sketch the recent reconfiguration of the dominant mode of produc-
tion by which the model of material manufacturing has been displaced by a
governing mode of service—which is to say, according to their analysis, as
affective industries. “Services,” they explain, “are characterized in general
by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and commu-
nication. In this sense many call the postindustrial economy an informa-
tional economy.”15 That informational economy, now dominated by the in-
ternet, binds affect to new media. For Hardt, writing elsewhere, modern
economic production at the turn of the millennium was defined in part
by a “combination of cybernetics and affect” and in part by its vision of
the biopolitical context as “the productive relationship between affect and

12. Ibid.
13. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential
Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno (Minneapolis, 1996): 133–47. “Emotional Labor”
is the term used by Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Hu-
man Feeling (Berkeley, 1983).
14. Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Toronto,
1987), p. 81. For a prehistory of these concepts, see Kathi Weeks, “Life within and against
Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics,” Ephemera 7 (Feb. 2007):
233–49.
15. Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 285. In Lazzarato’s
terms, “if Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-
Fordism integrates communication” so that “consumption is no longer only the ‘realization’
of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the
term communication” (Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” pp. 140, 141). For a more nuanced ac-
count, see Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present
(Albany, N.Y., 2003), pp. 122–34.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 681
value.”16 According to this logic, the informatics and economics of data pro-
cessing are interlocked by affect. For those who can still imagine an aspect of
life somehow separate from the empire of capital, that hinge might hold an
immanent potential for the solidarity of human bonding against the bond-
age of labor—a fulcrum to be exploited in leveraging the force of the human
against the heartlessness of profit.
The reality, however, seems decidedly darker. Rather than an effective
weapon to be mobilized in the fight against capital, affect has instead been
one of its most sedulously colonized territories. With particular relevance
for my topic here, affect itself has recently been commercialized as a key el-
ement of the business model of internet corporations in the age of social me-
dia. In the current emotional discourse of the Web, affect is figured as eval-
uation (the radio-button “Like” input on Facebook offers a prime example),
and one’s affective fluctuations are converted to commercial potential in the
short circuit between the exhibitionist branding of one’s own affective reg-
ister (“Look at me! this is me defined by what I like”) and the assimilation of
that putatively individualized identity, socially consolidated and promoted,
to the aggregated brand of the trademarked, commercially promoted corpo-
rate platform.17 Affect, under the regime of social media, takes part in the
capitalization of cathexis: tweeting and retweeting, in a ventriloquizing echo
of the bluebird of happiness. Indeed, the idiomatic resonance of Twitter’s
mascot is not coincidental, and the ominous obligatory modal in the song
that popularized the phrase might serve as a caution to those of us in a na-
scent world of social media: “we are in a world that’s just begun / And you
must sing his song, as you go along / When you find the bluebird of happi-
ness.”18
Alternately, in contrast to the shiny, happy veneer of a chirping “like” or
an approving thumbs-up, the evaluative function of affect also often regis-
ters demonstrative lament to the same exploitable ends. As Divya Victor
writes: “public performances of outrage and mourning synthetically rebrand

16. Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26 (Summer 1999): 97, 100. See also Rosalind Gill
and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness, and Cultural
Work,” Theory, Culture, and Society 25 (Dec. 2005): 11.
17. For a more insidious relation between capital, affect, and social media, see the early
warning by Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus, “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: MySpace
and Social Networks,” Ephemera 7 (Feb. 2007): 88–106. One might productively read that arti-
cle alongside Marie Buck’s Life and Style (New York, 2007), in which she aims “to situate a
gendered, lyrical subjectivity within the language of MySpace” because “its form dictates so
overtly as to nearly narrate the continual collapse of all forms of identity into identities of
commodification & commodity consumption” (p. ii).
18. Edward Heyman, and Harry Parr Davies, “Bluebird of Happiness,” www.musixmatch
.com/lyrics/Sandor-Harmati-Edward-Heyman-Harry-Parr-Davies/Bluebird-of-Happiness. See
also Maurice Maeterlinck, L’Oiseau bleue (Paris, 1909).

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682 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
and mask one’s social identity—one’s class, one’s institutional position. . . .
Our tear ducts are banks that weep out gold.” 19 In the “‘social factory,’”
wherein the demands of labor have been extended throughout the twenty-
four seven colonization of time—an endless workday in which even con-
sumers are tasked as producers—social media converts recreational free
time into free labor.20 However, whether deriding or liking, trolling or en-
couraging, any social media use whatsoever predicts declines in a user’s
well-being; irrespective of users’ moods and activities, they become less
happy the longer they stay online.21 The amalgam is disorienting: an ex-
periential realization of the negative affects produced by social media and
a widespread discourse of negative sentiment published and proliferated
on social media runs up against the insistent rhetoric of positive affect about
social media propagated by the corporations that would seek to commodify
any trackable affective response, whether positive or negative.
This volatile admixture makes the subject of affect especially resonant
when it is taken up by poetry sourced from online networks. And here is
one point at which the divergence of first- and second-wave conceptual
poetry can be easily discerned. As Felix Bernstein notes: “in distinction
to conceptual poetry . . . post-conceptual poetry attempts to explicitly
bring affect, emotion, and ego back into the empty networking structures
that govern us.”22 Robert Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate
Myself, for instance, contains hundreds of first-person avowals of desper-
ate loneliness, alienated angst, abject self-loathing, and isolated despair—all
apparently culled from online message boards, blogs, and comment streams
and all marshaled back into the empty governing structure of a James
Schuyler poem.23 Carefully smoothing the transitions between voices, Fit-

19. Divya Victor, interview with Caleb Beckwith, in Victor et al., Reconfiliating: Conversa-
tions with Conceptual-Affiliated Writers, ed. Beckwith (Laramie, Wyo., 2015), p. 60. “We are
these glassy lachrymatoria—our tear ducts are banks that weep out gold” (Victor, “The Next
Big Thing,” interview with pub., Les Figues Press, 7 Feb. 2013, lesfigues.blogspot.com/2013/02
/the-next-big-thing-divya-victor.html).
20. See Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” So-
cial Text 18 (Summer 2000): 33–34.
21. See Ethan Kross et al., “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in
Young Adults,” PLoS ONE 8 (Aug. 2013), journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371
/journal.pone.0069841&type=printable. See also Morten Tromholt, “The Facebook Experi-
ment: Quitting Facebook Leads to Higher Levels of Well-Being,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior,
and Social Networking 19 (Nov. 2016): 661–66. Furthermore, some of social media’s negative
psychological effects are demographically disproportionate; see Leonard Sax: “Why Do Girls
Tend to Have More Anxiety Than Boys?” The New York Times, 21 Apr. 2016, well.blogs
.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/why-do-girls-have-more-anxiety-than-boys/
22. Felix Bernstein, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Los Angeles, 2015), p. 38.
23. The structure of Fitterman’s book maps its incrementally longer lineated segments
onto the mannequin of James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem (New York, 1980), which in

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 683
terman merges his found texts into an aggregate chorus of cri-de-coeur
confessions loosely sorted into themed sections and sustained for a slowly
churning, unrelenting eighty pages leavened only by self-deprecating irony
and the occasional snarky snap of the syntax of chats and social-media
postings. Whether one reads the result as soliloquy or dramatic monologue
is indicative of one’s attitude toward online dialogue, but in either case it
serves as a lineated sociolinguistic investigation into the public idioms of
private sentiments and the language of what we might call ambient rela-
tionships (to adapt Leisa Reichelt’s description of the “ambient intimacy”
of social media and portable technology).24
In many ways, the pedigree of No, Wait traces directly back to concep-
tualism in an earlier mode, but its collocation of affect and social media is
instructive for the poetic concerns of the current moment. As one stro-
phe puts it: “In the modern world, where / technology connects us to
people we will never meet, / Who may not even exist, it’s easy to feel
alone.”25 Other sections continue the theme: The

mobile phone on the table beside me is also silent. It hasn’t rung,

beeped or throbbed, probably since yesterday, maybe
The day before: no calls, no emails, no Facebook notifications,
no tweets, no texts, and there’s nothing blinking on
The answering machine, because the landline hasn’t rung since
December, except people in call-centers who can’t
Pronounce my name. All of these methods of communication and yet
nobody’s communicating with me.
[N, pp. 48–49]
In some verses the connection is implicit: “I always feel lonely and am / al-
ways sitting in my room / On the internet trying to kill the time” (N, p. 11).26
Others posit explicit correlations: “I’m pretty sure that a lot / of loneliness

this context one might hear as the mourning of the poem: the lament, rather than the dawn, of
verse. Fitterman’s prosodic molding of carefully polished, appropriated online content into a
specific poetic precedent recalls Steven Zultanski’s Bribery (New York, 2014), which models its
paragraph breaks on Bruce Andrews’s I Don’t Have Any Paper, So Shut Up (or, Social Romanti-
cism) (Los Angeles, 1992). See also Miles Champion, Three Bell Zero (New York, 2000).
24. See Lisa Reichelt, “Ambient Intimacy,” Disambiguity, www.disambiguity.com/ambient
-intimacy/
25. Robert Fitterman, No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (New York, 2014), p. 46;
hereafter abbreviated N.
26. In terms relevant to the broader concerns here, Paul Stephens positions an earlier
Fitterman book in relation to digital culture; see Paul Stephens, “Reading Robert Fitterman’s
Now We Are Friends through the Lens of Ten Media Theoretical Terms,” Post45, 21 Jan. 2015,
post45.research.yale.edu/2015/01/reading-robert-fittermans-now-we-are-friends-through-the
-lens-of-ten-media-theoretical-terms/

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684 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
today is a result of / Modern technology”; “I started reading / someone’s
Tumblr about feeling / All lonely and, whatever, it’s totally stupid sound-
ing, / but then I felt exactly / The same way” (N, pp. 20, 4). And here is
where we can see why No, Wait, unlike most of the poems I will consider
here, benefits from being a printed book, with more intensive protocols
of reading than the screen and an immediately palpable sense of its duration
and page count. Although discrete sources are blended seamlessly at the lo-
cal level, readers are reminded at a stretch of the absurdity of sustaining a
coherent speaking subject in such a relentless reiteration of one idée fixe.
The book, as a unit, establishes the frame against which its irony can
emerge: so many isolated individuals, feeling as if they are completely alone
and that no one understands them, are actually quite unified and coherent
in both their feelings and the language with which they express those feel-
ings. “If you feel left out from this / Feeling of togetherness, believe me, you
are not alone” (N, p. 45). Echoing Groucho Marx’s quip about not wanting
to belong to any club that would have him as a member, one line laments:
“If only there were a match.com for friendship, / But as nobody admits to
needing any friends, who would join?” (N, p. 47).27
Turning to internet discourse for poetic materials, No, Wait finds dis-
cussions of poetry already in play and firmly aligned with the despondency
of the online commentary it expropriates. From the inset song of William
Carlos Williams’s early poem “Danse Russe” (“‘I am lonely, lonely. / I was
born to be lonely, / I am best so!’”)28 to amateur verse like “The Scorned
One,” posted to the blog-like webofloneliness.com,29 the poems incorpo-
rated into No, Wait are, unsurprisingly, about desolation, but so is the very
idea of poetry itself, which serves as the litmus of true despair: “all I do now
is sit around writing poetry. . . . I feel so lonely”; “I feel so lonely, like I need
somebody. I even wrote a poem about these feelings today—fuck, I just
need to turn everything around”; “if you think reading poetry is sad, just
try writing it!” (N, pp. 51, 3). Blurring that line, Fitterman writes his own
poem by reading others, and that dynamic between interior and exterior,
personal and public, resonates throughout the book. Not only is the ma-
terial predominantly drawn from discourse in a private mode published
in public fora, but it often describes scenes of private emotions in dynamic
tension with public settings: one speaker notes the numerous unemployed

27. See Erskine Johnson, “In Hollywood,” Dunkirk Evening Observer, 20 Oct. 1949, p. 22.
28. William Carlos Williams, “Danse Russe,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation
.org/poems/46483/danse-russe
29. See “The Scorned One,” Web of Loneliness Poems, 13 Dec. 2012, poems.webofloneliness
.com/2012/12/13/the-scorned-one/

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 685
middle-aged businessmen “trying to look inconspicuous” as they “jabber
away at a laptop” in the middle of the day at Starbucks; another “wastes
an afternoon” chatting up cashiers at local shops in a bid to try to cheer
himself up; others hold back tears on the bus, in cafés, or walking down
the street, until they find themselves “crying right there” in the civic spaces
of commercial public life (N, pp. 39, 41, 63–64, 66, 68).
That theme of public crying—a dramatization of the structures by which
social media aggregates records of individual affect—comes into even
sharper focus in Diana Hamilton’s Okay, Okay, which pays particular at-
tention the intersection of corporate employment and weeping.30 Crying
constitutes the affective activity par excellence because it both indexes emo-
tional states and is itself a precognitive physiological response—it is affective
in both the strict and casual senses of the word. Involuntarily expressed, the
liquid from lacrimal glands is also expressive. With its title suggesting either
impatient dismissal or comforting sympathy, Okay, Okay pulls back the cu-
bicle divider to reveal the inverted strictures and contradictory expectations
of the affective economy. From one side, as autonomist critics realized,
workers have been increasingly tasked with emotional labor, to the point
where certain affective situations—chaperonage, hospice care, and counsel-
ing, for example—have become products themselves. Even in other fields
and industries, however, employees are often expected to sell not just prod-
ucts but emotions not necessarily related to those products, such as feelings
of esteem, well-being, and so on. When the checkout clerk, following cus-
tomer service training, smiles and asks how your day is going, you witness
first hand the “commercialization of human feeling” by which internal
states are colonized as an extension of marketable exchange.31 As “the work-
er’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization
and command,”32 a range of business “organisations are increasingly seek-
ing to suppress, hide or manage an employee’s feelings” with explicit rules
“making emotion management another form of paid work.”33 Employees,
that is, may be simultaneously tasked with fostering positive affective re-
sponses in customers while masking their own negative responses, such
as the performative display of tears. Repressed in the name of professional-
ism, tears might or might not conform with the cultural expectations from

30. See Diana Hamilton, Okay, Okay (New York, 2012), truckbooks.org/pdfs/Hamilton
_OO.pdf
31. See Hochschild, The Managed Heart, pp. 189–90.
32. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” p. 134.
33. Sharon C. Bolton: “Emotion Here, Emotion There, Emotional Organisations Every-
where,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 11 (2000): 156.

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686 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
other social spheres, such as family, romance, religious ceremony, and
more. As one pertinent section of Hamilton’s book reads:
Sometimes it’s very hard to separate the work mode from the per-
sonal mode and the feeling mode. And sometimes you do get to the
point, we’ve all been there, we’ve all done that walk of shame past
our coworkers, from the boss’ office to the bathroom. You know,
it happens, we cry, we go to the bathroom, we clean ourselves up,
we drink a glass of water, um, definitely try to cool down the body,
in order to stop the crying. Work is about facts, it’s not about
feelings. It’s about facts, it’s not about whether or not someone likes
you, it’s not about, you know, whether or not you look good that
day, it’s about the facts, we’ve all been there, bottom line, we’re all
human, we all have feelings, we all get upset, it’s not the end of the
world. But best avoid it if possible.34
In the appropriated language of online infomercial articles and discussion
boards, Hamilton’s text quotes here from an elided transcript, merging
host and celebrity guest into a single, reassuring (“okay, okay”) voice.
The interview, for the record, can be heard via an embedded video on
the social media aggregating site Howdini. As the caption to the video
asks, soothingly: “Have you ever fought back tears in the office? We’ve
all been there. Melissa Kirsch, author of The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Ev-
erything, shares advice on how to deal with crying in the office.”35 The
framing message, with its insistent third-person plural, is collective expe-
rience: “we’ve all been there, bottom line, we’re all human, we all have
feelings, we all get upset.” Other passages in Hamilton’s book, however,
suggest that crying may be less universal, and instead specifically gen-
dered. From the one side, tears may be considered more or less accept-
able depending on cultural factors such as the weeper’s gender; from
behind the lids, moreover, those tears are produced in the “bodily mode”
of individuals who may be physiologically predisposed to a tearfulness
grounded in the affective response of the structurally and chemically sex-
differentiated limbic system and its regulation of hormones.36

34. Hamilton, Okay, Okay, p. 61.

35. Melissa Kirsch, “How to Deal with Crying in the Office,” Howdini, www.howdini.com
/video/6649796/how-to-deal-with-crying-in-the-office
36. For recent statistics on American attitudes toward crying in public, see
d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/i2qimxphnu/tabs_OP_Crying
_20160623.pdf. The address of the Howdini article is explicitly gendered (the first bullet-point
advice is to “make a beeline for the ladies’ room”) (Kirsch, “How to Deal with Crying in the
Office”).

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 687
This bodily mode emerges, in Hamilton’s book, from the interpolation of
comically timed message-board statements with a personal web-page article
by an executive coach (one obvious type of affective laborer).37 Blending
credentialed expert and opinionated posters in the way the previous section
blended interviewer and interviewee, Hamilton’s text continues:
You find yourself having a natural physiological response to feelings
that derive from events. Many women cry easily and unexpectedly,
especially around that time. Our socialization includes greater latitude
than boys to express emotions through crying. In some ways, this free-
dom serves us well as grown women, especially since September. There
is substantial research on “emotional intelligence” saying this ability
makes us better, more effective leaders. We are also better friends,
family members, and coworkers. You are not alone. In other words,
tears make us look bad.38
Whether foibles or virtues, culturally or biologically predisposed, tears here
serve Hamilton’s mashup in the way that affect serves the economics of
social media: data trumps semantic content, and any response—right or
wrong, true or false, positive or negative—will do to further the enterprise.
Okay, Okay opens with the architectural floor plan of an office suite and
several pages of disorienting, spatially impossible, collaged descriptions of
cubicles and open plan workspaces. Such environments exemplify a con-
centrated area of what Rem Koolhaas has termed “junkspace”: ephemeral,
lightweight, quickly dated, blandly cluttered, too-soon-shabby structures
that attract desultory renovation or dispassionately conceded vacancy.39
Such constructions, for Koolhaas, partition space into afterthought appor-
tionments of subdivided containers according to an ethos of uniform, air-
conditioned organization and disorienting borders. Identifiable by their
proliferation of liminal and transitional structures, these spaces gesture
halfheartedly toward the personal zones of domestic comfort and, simul-
taneously, to the corporate arenas of regimentation. Like the cubicle, junk-
space is neither ever quite private nor quite public. Furthermore, by assim-
ilating interior structures to the buildings that contain them, junkspace is
writ large in what a recent report described as “suburban corporate waste-
lands”: the tens of thousands of acres of abandoned, 1980s-era office parks,
corporate campuses, and bureaucratic compounds that have been vacated

37. See Susan Picascia and Linda M. Poverny “There’s No Crying in Business” (2011),
susanpicascia.com/noCrying.html
38. Hamilton, Okay, Okay, p. 61.
39. See Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175–90.

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688 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
across the United States by companies such as Pfizer, AT&T, Motorola, Am-
azon, and United Airlines.40
According to analysts, those vacancies can be attributed in large part to
the digital networks that have allowed more employees to work from
home, to stagger shifts flexibly, and to deaccession the vast accumulations
of onsite paper files—the backbone of the information infrastructure of
twentieth-century bureaucratic corporate management—in favor of dig-
ital files retrieved from remote, cloud-hosted hard drives.41 The built ar-
chitectures of junkspace have their equivalents in the online real-estate
domains that drove the profit and demise of companies that have moved
out of their oversized compounds or moved on entirely. The information
superhighway is littered with all sorts of abandoned, foreclosed, and di-
lapidating websites in what Joey Yearous-Algozin has called proliferat-
ing “dead zones”:42 vast tracts of failed large-scale enterprises (Friendster,
Napster, Altavista, Grooveshark, and others); orphaned personal web-
sites; broken links and 404 error pages; missing image files; derailed com-
ment threads; UNIX folders keyed to a forgotten password; web pages
with deprecated tags and superseded attributes, inoperative plugins, al-
tered protocols, software that is no longer supported; the accumulating
detritus of spam bots; and all the accounts that users forgot to delete on
MySpace and AOL, or that live on after their owners are deceased—aborted,
unupdated, and ineradicable.
That doubled sense of defunct lies at the heart of Sophia Le Fraga’s 2015
book literallydead, which literalizes the titular phrase—netspeak slang
that reaches for an emphatic beyond OMG—and which had been taken
as the Instagram handle for an account purportedly owned by a skeleton,
named Skellie, who ostensibly snaps selfies while modeling for the cam-
era at brunch, or in clubs, or at yoga.43 Her familiar pose, in many of the
posts, of the pivoted torso extending its parallel ulna and radius, the fore-
arm radically foreshortened to a point terminating just beyond the edge
of the image frame, underscores the narcissism of the genre, which has
become embodied in the symbiosis of stance and hardware. The techno-

40. These properties, significantly, stand empty at a vacancy rate of 16.6 percent, com-
pared with urban rates of 12.4 percent; see CBRE Group: “U.S. Commercial Real Estate Mar-
ket Continued Steady Recovery,” 10 Oct. 2013, www.cbre.com/about/media-center/2013/10/10
/us-commercial-real-estate-market-continued-steady-recovery
41. Catie Talarski, Tucker Ives, and John Dankosky, “The Suburban Corporate Waste-
land,” Where We Live, WNPR, 3 Dec. 2013, wnpr.org/post/suburban-corporate-wasteland
42. See Joey Yearous-Algozin, “Everybody’s Obituary,” 20 Sept. 2013, www.lulu.com
/items/volume_78/20644000/20644752/2/print/TT_Canceled_Anthology_Yearous-Algozin_for
_lulu.pdf
43. See www.instagram.com/omgliterallydead

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 689
logical symptom of the psychology of social media is evident in the ubiq-
uitous machines engineered to accommodate the forwarding software of
social media: smartphones that otherwise prioritize minimized weight
and production costs nonetheless yielding to the extravagance of redun-
dant cameras, one of which always looks back indulgently at the user.
The commercial facet of this logic, which tethers online and offline iden-
tities, reflects the pressure by data-mining corporations such as Google and
Facebook to encourage the “real name” authentication requirements that
augment the value of the information in which they trade.44
If the lighthearted gallows humor of “omgliterallydead” keeps Skellie
from developing into a full-blown allegory, Le Fraga recognizes the serious
side of this minor meme. Extending the archival impulse of fin-de-siècle
conceptualism to a world of ubiquitous and inadvertent archiving, liter-
allydead reprints the messages left on the walls of deceased Facebook users,
replete with texting abbreviations, misspellings, and occasional moments of
excruciatingly inappropriate and tragically belated spam: “Theres 30 hrs left
I’m so close to my goal and I can’t make it without u!/ Get these whimsical
songs of mine to come to life..i promiSe even 1$ helps!”; “Do you have some-
one with mental illness? I am participating in an overnight walk to raise
money for suicide prevention. Will you give?.”45 Throughout, the poems
in literallydead exhibit the excessive, compensatory insistence on positive af-
fect that has come to fill the tonal void of the new language of internet com-
munication: all caps typography, acronyms such as LOL, emoticon smiles,
less-than-three hearts, repeated exclamation marks, and other modes of ex-
aggerated inflection. But in Le Fraga’s book, those rhetorical flourishes col-
lide with the lachrymose states on display in Okay Okay—here in the guise of
genuinely heartbreaking sadness, grief, anger, and despair. Both modes,
moreover, are triangulated by the inexpressible refusal signaled by the
book’s title, which like “omg,” “idk,” and “I can’t even” asserts a precogni-
tive affective state of speechless stupor. These increasingly frequent surren-
ders of analysis might be parsed as indications of attempts to navigate be-
tween the social media Scylla of cheerful liking and its Charybdis of trolling.
Whatever they signify more broadly, Le Fraga’s book is replete with the
stalled articulations of the “literallydead” in the face of those who are, liter-
ally, dead: “I’m still in shock”; “I am speechless”; “I can’t imagine”; “I’ll
never know”; “no words can explain”; “I’m lost in words”; “I can’t articu-
late”; “it blows my mind”; “shocked”; “This is one of the few times Ive been

44. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 2016), p. 109.
45. Sophia Le Fraga, literallydead (Tucson, Ariz., 2015), pp. 40, 48.

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690 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
speechless due to news”; “OMG”; “omg”; “omg”; “omg” (l, pp. 14, 22, 22,
24, 40, 53, 47, 54, 59, 22, 29, 51, 53).
Others use memorialized accounts as fora not just for tributes or per-
sonal testimony, but for speaking with the dead in direct address: entreat-
ing, thanking, encouraging, cursing, requesting. or acknowledging signs.
Some simply chat: “Hey, I’m almost done with a book of poetry. I fell in
love recently, too. / I miss you so much, I have so many things to tell
you”; “So many thunderstorms lately!”; “Hey, I’m doing good in school”;
“saw Thor last night, know you would have loved all that Viking stuff /
even though I thought it was a bit goofy” (l, pp. 27, 39, 61). In other words,
the book proposes a conflation of the nineteenth-century spiritualist sense
of medium and the modern sense of new media: “I wasn’t planning on writ-
ing anything on Facebook. / It does no justice as a medium,” as one entry
indeterminately avers (l, p. 16). In the end, in fact, the subject of Le Fraga’s
book as a whole is as much about what cannot pass over, or live on, in the
technological terms of media themselves. Several posts explicitly invoke
the apps and tools integrated into the website, noting in passing its ability
to mix file types within the space of a single web page: “Dude I wish I could
pop open a Facebook message and chat for a minute”; “I remember you
sent me a long thing on Facebook chat talking about how / you liked my
art. No one had every talked about my work that way before”; “You were
just online and we were talking”; “I went through all of your pictures on
Facebook today. / Sometimes I laughed and read the comments” (l, pp. 28,
21, 29, 20). Literallydead, in its turn, emphasizes the sorts of content that
are meant to be seamlessly integrated into the interoperable structures of
a Web 2.0 page by foregrounding how ungainly those conventions are when
moved to the substrate of the printed codex page. Randomly generated
strings of YouTube web-address file names appear unremarkable and re-
main all but unread by online viewers when they announce a clickable link,
a browser’s uniform resource locator, or some scaled and automatically load-
ing file, but they become ungainly when read aloud or typed out on the page
where their cumbersome directory indexing is essentially meaningless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbQjp7kyp7U
i know you would love this track.
[l, p. 5]

Furthermore, the printed page itself is highlighted by the over-designed

materiality of Le Fraga’s book. In contrast to the perfect-bound paperback
format of Okay, Okay (which was also released as a PDF), literallydead ad-
vertises its craft bookness: thick unbleached sheets with visible decorative

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 691
fiber inclusions; even thicker, raw board covers letterpressed and sporting
an appliqué woodblock-print illustration of a smartphone wielding plague
doctor; a kraft-paper hinged spine; and colored endpapers with a cursor-
motif pattern print. In this way, the book restages the discordancy cues
of Le Fraga’s I Don’t Want Anything to Do with the Internet, in which the
appropriated language foregrounds the idiomatic conventions of social me-
dia meant to be written and read on a smartphone, while its format empha-
sizes hand-crafted print: the visual noise of photostatic reproduction; a
typeface emulating the irregular inking and damaged letterforms of a type-
writer; hand-cut cards bound with twine.46 In short, the form of these
publications announces a distance from the digital rhetoric of their content.
In the case of literallydead, Le Fraga emphasizes the difficulty of remediating
from screen to codex through the deliberate awkwardness of the book’s
print-page design, in which intentionally low-resolution images are posi-
tioned with calculated framing and unartful cropping to suggest browser
or file windows that need to be resized and properly scaled. Comprised
of screenshots from music videos, including several from the cruelly apt
“I Can’t See You I’m Dead,” these images do not fit on the page, either phys-
ically or in terms of their suitability.47 With these marked disparities be-
tween the screen animation from media such as Flash and HTML5-tagged
MP4 streaming video, on the one hand, and the static state of the printed
page on the other, Le Fraga winkingly speaks to the embedded asynchro-
nous data transfers that in part define the current state of the Web.
The cross-site confluence of otherwise unrelated databases also under-
writes Yearous-Algozin’s Lazarus Project. The sprawling work includes a
three-volume, 1,400-page installment invoking some 20,000 deceased named
on MyDeathSpace.com, a site that connects obituaries with the social media
accounts of people who have died. Like La Fraga, Yearous-Algozin implic-
itly equates human mortality with the moribund and defunct Web spaces of
dead-end digital artifacts hosted by sites with breathlessly short life spans.
His sense of the work’s relation to cross-platform dynamics is even more
explicit:
What’s interesting for me when this material—the description of
people’s deaths, say—operates in a virtual plane is how it moves.
Even long texts are easily transported and stored and their URLs
can be shared across multiple platforms. It’s not any different than
any other piece of data and our phones or laptops don’t care about

46. See Sophie Le Fraga, I Don’t Want Anything to Do with the Internet (n. p., 2012/2014).
47. Schlomo, “I Can’t See You I’m Dead,” Bad Vibes (2011).

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692 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
what kind of .doc or .jpg you’re downloading. In a sense, this im-
poverishment reaches a limit point in the digital environment. . . .
It becomes nothing more than death infecting information in all its
terrifying flatness.48
Yearous-Algozin here pinpoints the great paradox of the multimedia, dy-
namic Web: the diversity of its sources are all funneled to the more heg-
emonic frame of the single portal site, and its diversity of media, from
still images to animated video to sound to text, are at their base all shar-
ing the same substrate of numerical code and globally standardized pro-
tocols. This homogeneous uniformity leads to the “terrifying flatness”
suffusing internet information in all of its impoverished forms. Lazarus
hints at the leveling numerical code underlying its born-digital text with
the relentless 1/0 binary structure of death and resurrection that organizes
its strophes. The poem opens:

Hanah Puga (20) allegedly took her own life

Hanah Puga (20) comes back to life
Erik Halldorson (40) took his own life after a battle with depression
Erik Halldorson (40) comes back to life
Kameron Jacobsen (14) killed himself and his father Kevin commit-
ted suicide less than a year later
Kameron Jacobsen (14) and his father Kevin come back to life
Danielle Willard (21) was shot by police
Danielle Willard (21) comes back to life49
The text continues its flickeringly repetitive off-on couplets for page
after page, volume after volume of naïve reversals that obviously fail to per-
form their performative task. The resulting catalogue, by turns disturbing
and anesthetizing, provokes what Sueyeun Juliette Lee has identified as
the “traumatic stuplime”: a reader’s affective reaction to socially violent
content proliferated in a coldly monotonous and protracted durational
form.50 Lee’s term modulates Sianne Ngai’s characterization of avant-garde
texts that elicit “an aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradox-

48. Yearous-Algozin, “Poetry Is Not the Final Girl: Joey Yearous-Algozin,” interview with
Trisha Low, Harriet Blog, 22 Apr. 2015, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/04/poetry-is
-not-the-final-girl-joey-yearous-algozin/
49. Yearous-Algozin, MyDeathSpace.com, vol. 1 of The Lazarus Project: MyDeathSpace.com
(n. p., 2013), p. [4].
50. See Sueyeun Juliette Lee, “Shock and Blah: Offensive Postures in ‘Conceptual’ Poetry
and the Traumatic Stuplime,” The Volta 41 (May 2014), www.thevolta.org/ewc41-sjlee-p1.html

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 693
ically united with boredom.”51 Indeed, reading through the volumes, one
begins to feel the weight of Rainer Maria Rilke’s realization, in his own Laz-
arus poem, of the dread that all the dead might rise again: “ihn graute jetzt,
es möchten alle / Toten durch die angesaugte gruft wiederkommen [he
dreaded that all the dead might come rushing back through the suction
of that tomb].”52 Where Le Fraga’s book might still function as a genuine
expression of personal grief (albeit one navigating the newly public forms
of personal correspondence), the totalizing scope of Yearous-Algozin’s pro-
ject feels too glibly impersonal to do the work of mourning. Nonetheless, if
the tone of Lazarus strikes a slacker cut-and-paste pose, the basic structure
is still familiar from what Jahan Ramazani has identified as the “compensa-
tory economy” of the canonical elegy.53 Recall John Milton’s genre-defining
“Lycidas,” which announces in its first stanza “Lycidas is dead” and then
adjures, in its penultimate stanza: “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep
no more, / For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead.”54 Percy Shelley similarly
balances the opening of his “Adonais,” “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!,”
with a following prestidigitation: “Peace, peace! he is not dead.”55 Eschew-
ing Milton’s consoling succor and the complicating metaphoric inversions
at the end of Shelley’s poem, the clipped monotony of Yearous-Algozin’s
bare, swift grammatical reversals suggests an impatient revision to the ele-
vated ambitions of the elegy’s poetic legacy, which would also include the
tradition, inherited from the Renaissance, of poets’ attempts to imagine that
the lyric could restore the natural world to harmonious vivancy. Despite
this august pedigree, Trisha Low flatly accuses Yearous-Algozin in an inter-
view: “you don’t believe in poetry at all, only platforms.”56
That faith in platforms, which we might gloss as the particular net-
worked devices that render data in culturally intelligible ways, marks a final
remarkable development in conceptual writing’s relation to digital tech-

51. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. 271. A single, startling jolt
comes in the middle of volume 2, where Yearous-Algozin’s friend and fellow poet, Trisha
Low, is unceremoniously and ceremonially killed and resurrected. The murder takes place
at the Golden Wok, presumably the restaurant just four miles north of the SUNY Buffalo
campus where Yearous-Algozin attended the poetics program; see Yearous-Algozin,
MyDeathSpace.com.
52. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Lazarus,” Sämtliche Werke (Berlin, 1963), 2:50; trans. Edward
Snow, Uncollected Poems (New York, 1996), p. 37.
53. Jahan Ramanzani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chi-
cago, 1994), p. 71.
54. John Milton, “Lycidas,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44733
/lycidas
55. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” Poetry Foun-
dation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45112/adonais-an-elegy-on-the-death-of-john-keats
56. Low, “Poetry Is Not the Final Girl.”

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694 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
nology. As we have seen, the intersection of technological systems and cul-
tural practices constitutes an essential aspect of the remediated poetry of Le
Fraga and Yearous-Algozin, but the latter further allegorizes the technical
support of his book. The Lazarus Project was published by Troll Thread, an
imprint for born-digital PDF publications begun in 2010. The publisher’s
name, indicating an online comment thread in which the discussion has
been terminated, diverted, or deformed by provocative and malicious in-
tervention, speaks directly to their awareness of the digital platform’s em-
bedded social aspects. Founded the same year as Troll Thread, the similarly
structured Gauss PDF is also indicative of my argument here. Eliding the
acronyms for “probability density function” and “portable document for-
mat,” the publisher’s name conflates the quantization of medial noise in
Gaussian dither, which one might easily take as a metaphor for the literary
provocations of its publications in the face of more mainstream publish-
ing, with the coded format of those publications themselves.
Both Gauss PDF and Troll Thread publish their books on Tumblr pages. Al-
though most titles are also available via the print-on-demand self-publishing
platform Lulu, neither publisher promotes or privileges printed editions.
The choice of a microblogging social network as the venue for literary pub-
lication signals a generation of poets who—for the first time in at least a cen-
tury—are not primarily concerned with publishing conventional printed
books. Recognizing conceptual poetry’s “hospitality for digital textuality,”
and the database implications of what it means to write and read in the
twenty-first century, presses such as Troll Thread and Gauss PDF extend
that aspect of poetics to the publication of poetry itself.57 In the process, they
bypass the ritual of the first slim volume, which used to serve as a debutante
calling card announcing a poet’s bid for entry into the society of letters.
Significantly, these new outlets for publishing radically reduce the in-
vestments of both time and capital required to print a book; a work can
be published on Tumblr in minutes rather than weeks (and withdrawn
just as rapidly), while the material investment, in turn, requires merely in-
ternet access rather than the thousands of dollars needed to print and bind
and ship even the standard thermal-bound paperback. Poets are taking
new risks in the rates and scales of production accordingly.58 The questions

57. Holly Melgard, “Part 1,” interview with CAConrad et al., 8-Pointed Star, 8pointedstar
.blogspot.com/2012/05/troll-thread-poetry-collective.html
58. See Ibid, “Part 3.” Tan Lin notes that the new broad-channel venues for poetry pro-
duction and publication paradoxically accommodate and mirror both “sluggish durational
lazy aggregation” and also the “swift dissemination of found data” (Tan Lin, “Poetry Opera-
tions, Black Noise, and Versions of Hiatus,” Harriet Blog, 4 May 2014, www.poetryfoundation
.org/harriet/2014/05/poetry-operations-black-noise-and-versions-of-hiatus/). Lin is picking up

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 695
are no longer those of restricted economies (Is a work good enough to jus-
tify the cost of production? Is it better than another work that could be
published in its place? Is a manuscript revised sufficiently to take a final
form?) but rather of the general economy conundrum—well, why not?
The affordances of the PDF, likewise, have inflected the styles and contours
of the work produced, permitting the texts themselves to explore the limits
of scale, sophistication, and spontaneity.59 In the process, these publica-
tions test the minimum threshold for the genre of poetry.
Moreover, the embedded, leveling, ubiquitous digital space of dis-
course means that the commentary on new work circulates in new ways
as well. The first phase of conceptual writing happily turned to the internet
for source material to plunder but then transposed it to print and from
there to discussions at readings and social gatherings free from live tweets
or Vimeo futures, all with the hope that it might be discussed in print: ac-
ademic journals shelved in libraries or xeroxed zines distributed through
the postal service and taking up shelf space at Small Press Distribution. To-
day, in contrast, the internet is often completely coextensive with poetic
practice: not just a source of material or a model to emulate or an ethos
to mimic but also the publishing platform, the means of distribution,
and the mode of production as well as the space of the poetry scene, and
the venue for both the casual and professional analysis and discussion of
poetics. “Nowadays,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has recognized in a study
of authorship and contemporary academic scholarship,
authors’ statements about their work are laid alongside those of crit-
ics and fans, all commingling via the same web services and streams,
the same platforms and feeds, all discoverable by means of a com-
mon interface, the search bar at the top of the browser.60
In part, this confluence is simply keeping with vernacular practice, which
trends toward acts of countersigning in a network where files are perpet-
uated and shunted in reposted relays across proprietary sites: reblogged,
regrammed, pinned and embedded, shared and streamed, alias-linked,

on Yearous-Algozin’s cue that we might consider the low-level durational activity of always-
on-line networked reading and writing in light of Bruno Latour’s epistemology of the hiatus:
“un pas, un saut, une passe qui nous permette de définir les existants aussi comme une
manière particulière d’établir une continuité à travers des discontinutités” (Bruno Latour,
Enquête sur les modes d’existence: une anthropologie des modernes [Paris, 2012], p. 94).
59. For a consideration of the cultural imaginary of the technical specification of the por-
table document format, see Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Doc-
uments (Durham, N.C., 2014), pp. 111–35.
60. Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is an @uthor?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6
Feb. 2015, lareviewofbooks.org/article/uthor/

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696 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
liked or commented—but always kept circulating on the Web to which
users are connected with increasing continuity (in hand, in pocket, on
the wrist). These practices are encouraged by the commerce of data min-
ing by social media companies, which depend on analyzing individual ac-
tions against collective statistical aggregates and which see the affiliations
between users—regardless of what messages pass between them—as itself
a valuable information commodity.61 At the same time, embedded repe-
tition rhymes in precise ways with the appropriative poetics of conceptual
writing. Chris Sylvester, one of the founding editors of Troll Thread, sin-
gles out a common point among the collective’s diverse practices by not-
ing that conceptual texts and their sources are similarly coextensive: “you
don’t leave the site of a previous text as you repeat it” through appropri-
ative strategies.62
Under these conditions of textual overflow, comingling, and satura-
tion, the social network of poets threatens to eclipse their poems, which
have been rendered all but unnecessary for the production of a discourse
about poetics. Not only is a poem no longer a requisite occasion for what
passes as poetry criticism, but the social network can assume the role of
the poetic text itself.63 A digital PDF file of a Facebook comment stream,
for just one cautionary example, was recently published as poetry. The
Lulu.com description of the print-on-demand collection reads:
From 2012 to 2014, the poet and artist Vanessa Place regularly re-
posted other poets’ Facebook status updates as if they were her
own. One such appropriated update, reprinted as the cover of this
book, prompted a poet to block Place. Thirty-eight poets responded
to his announcement “Vanessa Place . . . blocked.” This book re-
produces verbatim their Facebook discussion.64
Despite the claim, the reproduction is not quite verbatim. Instead, proper
and proprietary names have been redacted. One representative page, for
instance, reads:
Poet ohhhh I see now . . . she has copied my
Entries on Some Other Social Media Site as

61. See Chun: Updating to Remain the Same, pp. 111–26.

62. Chris Sylvester, “Part 4,” interview with CAConrad et al.
63. There is some irony in the fact that the most talked-about poem of 2015, Kenneth
Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown”—an unpublished text that none of the numerous
discussants had in fact read with their own eyes—was based on the report from an autopsy
(autopsia, from the postclassical Latin, via the Greek, atτός [self ] plus όψiς [vision]: the act
of seeing with one’s own eyes).
64. Lulu, www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/38-poets/vanessa-place-blocked/paperback/product
-22009514.html

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 697
Well . . . I think it’s part of a project that she is
working on..I guess it didn’t bother me but I
can see how feelings could be hurt.
9 hours ago • Like • 365
Displaying the formatting attributes retained by up-to-date cut-and-paste
tools, the book’s typography—underlining, boldface, and varied colors—
divulges vestigial artifacts of what once indicated functioning HTML
hyperlinks. With individual names reduced to general terms (tweets, in the
source for the passage above, for example, becomes “Entries on Some Other
Social Media Site”), the repurposed text further suggests that specific con-
tent matters less than the fact of participatory inscription within the net-
work. A troll thread from its very inception, the entire discussion was
sparked by Place’s ventriloquism of a self-promoting post by Dorothea
Lasky, which boasted:
Dear friends, I am so happy to report that I have a new book of po-
ems coming out this fall from W.W. Norton’s historic Liveright im-
print, The book is called Rome and there are four poems from it in
the current issue of The Paris Review. And here is its cover.66
For the double détournement of Place’s détourned text, Lulu’s anonymous
appropriation of Lasky’s vocabulary is perfect; a “cover” is also, of course,
a disguise or concealment, a screen or pretense, a published plagiarism:
“the recording of a song, etc., which has already been recorded by some-
one else.”67 Where Lasky’s writing still moves between the online world
and the off-line institutions of print, with its established Manhattan
publishers and bound journals, Vanessa Place . . . Blocked is the epitome
of the new media regime—at once the embodiment and vanishing point
of conceptual poetry.
If the first phase of conceptual writing openly challenged the ideolo-
gies of creativity and originality foregrounded by the rhetoric of institu-
tionalized creative writing, the current phase challenges conceptual writ-
ing’s own ideologies of artistic value in turn. Featuring poems of entirely
appropriated language, a priori structures, impersonal procedures, and
modest authorial interventions, the current mode continues the trajectory
of conceptual writing’s initial critique of uniquely expressive lyric subjec-
tivity, but it further challenges the residual aspirations to the literary—an

65. 38 Poets, Vanessa Place . . . Blocked (2015), p. [29].

66. Ibid.
67. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “cover.”

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698 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
antiquated cathexis to the codex and various unrelinquished criteria for
aesthetic values—that conceptual writing never thought to surrender or
fully dispute. This new phase of conceptual poetry unhesitatingly takes
up conceptualist techniques, but it does so toward fundamentally different
ends. And in the current cultural climate, that could not be otherwise. Troll
Thread, in other words, may be a more openly literal declaration of intent
than the flippantly whimsical phrase it might at first have sounded like.
Yearous-Algozin describes the phenomenon of the troll thread as “a dis-
rupted comment stream or message board, such that conversation derails
and is ultimately abandoned.” The troll, he continues, inserts itself into a
discourse in order “to derail a conversation between sincere and interested
users.”68 Where the online troll refuses the social values of discursive norms,
the new conceptualisms refuse the literary values of even the avant-garde’s
poetic ambitions. PDFs proliferate under the cover of conceptualism like so
many acts of generic vandalism in an abandoned terrain vague.
One consequence of this new dispensation will be the transformation
of the nascent canon of conceptual writing. From the current vantage,
with its new vanishing point, some works now appear to be looking back-
ward, casting last glances at the traditions they distilled or opposed, while
others now appear unexpectedly prescient. For just one example, the new
perspective makes Tan Lin’s writing seem especially prophetic and per-
cipient. Lin’s Heath project, for instance, which registered as somewhat
eccentric in 2007, now stands as a more central and significant antecedent
to the current poetic discourse than any of the works that formed the ini-
tial canon of self-styled conceptual writing. The project is comprised of
several editions, including digitized versions in various file formats, that
exploit paratexts in order to confuse the limits of the book by folding an-
cillary texts into the center of a book as if the codex were an impossible
space with a larger interior than the exterior surface of its covers could
contain. Linking Plagiarism/Outsource to Heath Course Pak to a number
of online texts, Lin constructs what Kristen Gallagher has termed an ex-
panded “text and image environment.”69

68. Yearous-Algozin, “Everybody’s Obituary,” pp. 7, 8.

69. Lin, Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource (Tenerife, 2009); hereafter abbreviated H. Part of the
strategic disorientation of his project includes destabilizing titles, authorship attributions,
chronologies, and publication dates. Lin’s book is alternately titled Heath, alternately titled
Plagiarism/Outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untitled Heath Ledger Project, A
History of the Search Engine, Disco OS; alternately titled Untilted Heath Ledger Project; Tan
Lin: Heath Course Pak (Denver, Colo., 2012), alternately titled Heath Course PAK RFC, alter-
nately titled HeathCourcePack. See Daniel Scott Snelson, “Heath, Prelude to Tracing the Actor
as Network,” aphasic-letters.com/heath/. See also Kristen Gallagher, “The Authorship of Heath

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 699
That environment, as we have seen, transforms itself dynamically accord-
ing to the trackable activities of the browser in an algorithmic Web of tar-
geted marketing databases, user-generated profiles, and registered subscrip-
tions. Thus, although the language in Heath is largely outsourced and copied
from others, it could not have been compiled by anyone but Lin. Most of the
particular elements jumbled together in Lin’s books were originally generated
by chance, through unpredictable server scripts, but their contingent con-
figuration depends on the unique gestures, transactions, and reading activ-
ities performed over time by Lin within a corporatized mesh of networks.
For one example of the circulation of text in this “reading system driven by
the search engine,” consider the following paragraph: “each morning at the
Pickwick was narrowly descriptive and ‘as inert as possible,’ subject to era-
sure or re-distribution” (H). The quoted phrase would seem to serve as an
apt description of Lin’s “ambient poetics” of relaxation;70 “the stories that I
tell,” Lin explains elsewhere, “are a bit inert.”71 A footnote, however, indi-
cates that the line is sourced from the home-decorating section of an out-
moded website aimed at geriatric residents of Cleveland:
Even the natural materials in your bedroom are best if they are as
inert as possible. For example, fresh pine has a smell that could in-
terfere with restful sleep, as can a houseplant if the soil is a bit mil-
dewed or waterlogged.72 [See H, p. (84)]
The theme of the website is health, a single keystroke from the theme of
Heath. Be that as it may, the missing link, as it were, is in fact another
page deep within the same site, not noted in Heath, which erases and re-
distributes the path to an article listing the “Top Ten Costumes for Hal-
loween” and declaring the second “hottest costume for 2008” to be the

Ledger in the New Reading Environment; on Tan Lin’s Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource,” Criticism
51 (Fall 2009): 701.
70. See Jennifer Scappettone, “Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in
Tan Lin’s Ambient Poetics,” boundary 2 36 (Fall 2009): 63.
71. Lin, “Writing as Metadata Container: An Interview with Tan Lin,” interview by Chris
Alexander et al., Jacket2, 20 Jan. 2012, jacket2.org/interviews/writing-metadata-container. See
Charles Bernstein, “Poet’s Sampler: Tan Lin,” Boston Review, 1 Apr. 1999, bostonreview.net
/poetry/tan-lin-poets-sampler-tan-lin. For a consideration of Lin’s work in terms of affective
labor, with important emphasis on the racial politics of the non-appropriated material in
Heath, see Paul Stephens, “The Poetics of Celebsploitation: Celebrity Culture and Social Me-
dia in Recent American Poetry,” Amodern, Oct. 2015, amodern.net/article/celebsploitation/
72. Annie B. Bond, “Design a Blissful Bedroom,” CleavlandSeniors.Com, clevelandseniors
.com/home/dec-bedroom.htm

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700 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
Joker, because “Heath Ledger’s phenomenal rendition of the Joker has
fans flocking to the costume shops in droves to pay homage to the dark
character and a beloved, talented actor.”73 Such routes of detour and dis-
traction, contingency and determined research, describe the contours of
reading in the garden of internet forking paths, its soil—however mil-
dewed or waterlogged—shot through with rabbit-hole warrens. Heath ma-
terializes a cartography of that terrain by recording the itineraries of inter-
connected, hyperlinked queries in a text that registers online reading, with
all its inscriptive traces, as writing. Subtitled a “history of the search en-
gine” in one of its iterations, Heath documents a particular moment in
which the algorithmic flexibility of search-engine interfaces was beginning
to make the apparent spelling error of another of Lin’s subtitles less signif-
icant to querying users: “Untilted Heath Ledger Project” (H, p. [1]).74 Cor-
recting, including, and anticipating, the modern algorithmic search engine
returns what it considers to be the proper term—untitled for “untilted,”
Heath Ledger for “health ledger”—regardless of human intention or mis-
typing.
Heath is a history not just of the search engine, but of the wider Web as
it became filtered, fed, integrated, and syndicated—structuring data in or-
der to automatically aggregate, update, and tailor the dissemination of
newly published information. Specifically, Lin takes several internet for-
mats and protocols—RSS (Rich Site Summary) and the RDF (Resource
Description Framework) modeling on which it is based, SMS (Short Mes-
sage Service) and the GSM (Groupe Spéciale Mobile) standards from
which it evolved, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the then newly renovated
XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) into which it was
integrated—as both the subject and mode of his composition.75 Although
these are not all equivalent structures (and not all easily integrated), they
are all indicative of the metadata structure of the semantic web, and they
speak to the increasing automation of the internet and its even smaller in-

73. “Top Ten Costumes for Halloween,” CleavlandSeniors.Com, www.clevelandseniors.

com/family/halloween-costumes-08b.htm. For a different poetic investigation of outsourced
literary labor, see Nick Thurston, Of the Subcontract, or Principles of Poetic Right (York, 2013).
74. The source, one presumes, was Chris Norris, “(Untitled Heath Ledger Project),” New
York Magazine, 18 Feb. 2008, nymag.com/news/features/44217/
75. See Snelson, “Heath, Prelude to Tracing the Actor As Network,” dss-edit.com/heath/.
In line with Lin’s interest in protocol, the cover spelling of Heath Course Pak suggests the
.pak file format extension, a nonstandardized nomenclature indicating compressed archive
packages that most systems consider as a .zip file.

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 701
crements of data transfer: notifications, alerts, real-time pushes, and con-
tinuous XHR machine communication. Recognizing the reconfiguration
of temporal scale and pace made by these technologies, furthermore, helps
to explain the otherwise capricious inclusion of twenty pages of legal dis-
claimers, technical specifications, and crowdsourcing appeals from the
Project Gutenberg digital edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, along with
the editor’s introduction to the eighteenth-century edition and the preface
from the nineteenth-century edition from which the digitized text derived.
Lin’s initial raison d’être for turning to Samuel Pepys would seem to be the
earlier inclusion of a subscription news-feed notice of a newspaper article
about the accuracy of Wikipedia, which happened to feature an analysis by
biographer Claire Tomalin of the site’s entry on Pepys.76 By reprinting the
framing texts to The Diary, but nothing from Pepys’s own text, Lin contin-
ues his investigation of paratexts and the social framing of data. Moreover,
an investigation into Wikipedia’s rapidly revised, widely sourced, and obses-
sively structured data is in keeping with the other aspects of the Web high-
lighted by Lin. But those featured technologies, with their constant coded
notices, also underscore the degree to which Pepys’s coded and compressed
tachygraphic chronicle is itself less like a classical memoir and more like a
modern blog: a set of seventeenth-century time-stamped status updates reg-
istering quotidian minutiae. Heath restages Pepys’s diary with a twist—Lin’s
recognition that the personal recording of everyday life is now part of the
experience of everyday life. Heath is essentially the display of updates about
updating.77
As in literallydead, the deliberately misformatted, oversized, and under-
resolved elements in Heath signal the asymmetrical remediation between
screen and page, but unlike the relatively solemn stillness of the former,
in which video frames are frozen, silent and motionless, like the accounts
of the deceased, the visually incongruous elements in Heath produce a jar-
ring surface and loudly announce, like the uncorrected untilted title, an
aesthetic willing to embrace the appearance of haste, impatience, and in-
dolent indifference. In contrast to the obsessive, relentless, cool systemati-
city of turn-of-the-millennium conceptual projects, which paraded uniform
surfaces of deodorized polish, the newer projects flaunt an air of unembar-
rassed carelessness.

76. See Mike Barnes et al., “Can You Trust Wikipedia?,” The Guardian, 24 Oct. 2005,
www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/oct/24/comment.newmedia
77. For the cultural force of the logic of the update, see Chun, Updating to Remain the
Same.

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702 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
Telling traces of this willingness to admit unvarnished skeins recur in
Danny Snelson’s Epic Lyric Poem: 167121 Songs, 257.8 MB File. As the sub-
title intimates, the book stands with one foot firmly planted in the ex-
haustive, database poetics of late twentieth-century conceptual writing
and the other striding forward into the current social media networks
of distributed data. On the one hand, the poem is meticulously edited
to adhere to the formal constraint of precisely fifty-five characters per line
(the average length of a pop-song verse, according to the book’s jacket
copy); the pages, consequently, block to smoothly justified margins in
the monospaced Courier typeface used to set the text. But that editing
is all to the point; Snelson’s fidelity is to the format, rather than the con-
tent. A comparison with the source material for the poem reveals that he
had no qualms about altering the raw material of his found text.78 That
text originally took the form of an SQL torrent file, that is, one structured
by metadata in order to pull relational data streams that could both effi-
ciently distribute the file as a whole and hierarchically organize its con-
tents in subsequent reassembly. In this case, the contents featured lyrics
to popular songs, presumably compiled to facilitate building one of the
dubious websites, such as siteforlyrics.com, proliferated in an attempt
to game the search engine optimization algorithms with the aim of attracting
Web searches and generating advertising revenue. With a pataphysical mis-
apprehension of vernacular terms (epic meaning impressive rather than in-
dicating a heroic narrative verse, lyric as pop-song libretto rather than short
intimate poem), Snelson then employed a Python script to extract all the in-
stances of phrases containing the string “lyric” from the database, which he
sculpted into a mock mock-epic poem of fifty-five stanzas of twenty lines
each.
Along with verses from songs, Snelson also preserves the residue of para-
textual data, in fractured palimpsest, swept along in the torrent stream:
fragments of HTML tags; anchored URL addresses to internet dead ends;
snippets of formatting code; user emails and handles; apostrophes in place
of quotation marks; and the texting chatter etiquette of a culture dependent
on user generated content (such as “thnx!,” “tnx,” “please click,” and var-
ious editorial notes and apologies for failures or deviations). A representa-
tive stanza reads:

78. The source was published alongside a PDF of the result, see Dany_Epic-Lyric-Poem
_Troll-Thread_3-2-14.sql.zip

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 703
Sorry — some of these lyrics have not been transcribed.
Mental seduction, yr sound suction, abduction of lyrics
That perpetratin and takin our lyrics, non-originatin’’
Sorry, i have no lyrics of this song, br>would please a
font color=#666699>submit the lyrics for this song /fon
The ocean’’ & ‘‘i believe your sweet love’’ lyrics from
Recordings of these songs exist. Lyrics taken carefully
Part of the anti-heroin project. Lyrics taken carefully
Married men. The lyrics taken from the japanese single.
Starring charlie sheen. Lyrics from carefully listening
Soften, dilute, poeticize, or commercialize our lyrics,79

The obvious irony, of course, is that the “abduction of lyrics” here involved
multiple appropriations (plagiarism, we might recall, is originally an ab-
duction, with its etymology in the Classical Latin plagiārius [a “person
who abducts the child or slave of another, kidnapper, seducer”]), and de-
spite the apologetic disclaimer, they have in fact been transcribed by a se-
ries of machines and humans, including Snelson himself, who would turn
the unsung apology into a self-consciously poetic—if not quite lyric—
form.80 Besides including the torrent material that accompanied the song
lyrics proper, Snelson also inserts his own text in order to fulfill the character-
count constraint for each line. In the conclusion to the stanza above, for ex-
ample, “poeticize” performatively rounds out a phrase from the Boogie
Down Productions song “My Philosophy,” edging it, in the process, into di-
alogue with unedited boasts from Puff Daddy (“known as the poetical, lyr-
ical, miracle son”)81 and Canibus (“my specialty is: poetically lyrically ener-
getically this”), which both appear elsewhere in Epic Lyric Poem.82 In line
with his poeticizing “poeticize,” Snelson’s emendations and redactions are
often recursively self-conscious nods to the media and genres at issue.
The introduction of “book” (along with forged double apostrophes) to a line
from D. C. Talk’s “Can I Get a Witness,” for instance, transforms one met-
aphoric sense of “spine” to another: “I don’’t water down lyrics or forget the
book’’s spine” (E, p. [24]). Similar insertions include nods to the programs,

79. Snelson, Epic Lyric Poem: 167121 Songs, 257.8 MB File (2015), p. [21]; hereafter abbrevi-
ated E.
80. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “plagiary.”
81. Puff Daddy, “P.E. 2000,” Forever (Bad Boy 78612-73033-2, 1999).
82. Canibus, “Horsementality,” 2000 B.C. (Before Can-I-Bus) (Universal Records 012
159054-2, 2000).

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704 Craig Dworkin / Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
files, and structures that made Snelson’s own book—whether in its un-
bound PDF format or with a POD spine—possible: Python, SQL, and struc-
tured data. A sampling of the relevant samples includes: “pistol-whippin
your body with my python lyrical odyssey”;83 “from the SQL lyrics that
might actually make you think”;84 “with a bewildering array a SQL database
lyrical display”;85 “I got these lyrics waking up all their database spirits”;86 “it
goes one two three when i’’m kicking the data lyrics”;87 and so on (E, p. [20]).
Accuracy, however, never characterized the original database either, which
is riddled with digital detritus and was compiled by amateur stenographers
who often misheard or mistyped lyrics to begin with. Here again we can
glimpse the evolving ecology of language in the algorithmic environment.
To generate advertising revenue by attracting users to the site, the data from
the SQL file never needed to be accurate; it merely had to be good enough to
direct a query, something made possible by the new generation of auto-
correcting predictive engines.
The same, Snelson implicitly asserts, is true of poetry as well. With its
retentions of extraneous material and its blatant editorial augmentations
and truncations, Epic Lyric Poem openly acknowledges the all-too-human
nodes that still operate in the discourse networks of increasingly auto-
mated inscription, and the tension between text meant for human readers
and text meant for machine readers. In doing so, it tacks against earlier
modes of conceptual appropriation, which tended to offer tidily polished
texts under an ideology of unedited replication. The primary device of that
earlier conceptual practice was the blunt reframing of found texts in order
to defamiliarize their language, critique their implicit presuppositions, or
bring out the inherent and unexpected literariness of demotic writing. For
Epic Lyric Poem and other poems of its moment, the interest lies more in
the impossibility of the demarcating dream of the frame itself. Where ear-
lier works of conceptual writing frequently removed Web-based texts from
the networks on which they were found in order to recontextualize them,
works like Lazarus, Epic Lyric Poem, and The Making of the Americans re-

83. See Kid Capri: “Soundtrack to the Streets,” Soundtrack to the Streets (Track Masters
491602 2, 1998).
84. See The Offspring: “Disclaimer,” Ixnay on the Hombre (Columbia Records CK 67810,
1997).
85. See Canibus, “Master Thesis,” Mic Club: The Curriculum (Mic Club Music MCB 7120,
2002).
86. See Ice Cube, “Pushin’ Weight,” War and Peace Vol. I (Priority Records P2 50700, 1998).
87. See Bloodhound Gang: “Mama Say,” Use Your Fingers (Cheese Factory CK 27225,
1995).

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 Critical Inquiry / Summer 2018 705
main as part of the networks that produced them, continuing rather than
extirpating their procedures. If the failure of the first phase of conceptual
writing was to imagine that it could separate itself, at will, from the data-
base culture that it mimed and mined, the danger of current practice is that
readers might still imagine that it wants to.

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