Poetry Unbound - by Mike Chasar (Paperback)

About the Book

Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, he follows poetry's travels off the page into new media formats.

Book Synopsis

It's become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways.

Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry's travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry's audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry's ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry's surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry's still evolving place in American culture.

Review Quotes

Chasar's argument powerfully renovates how we imagine 'a literary form available to all.'-- "Genre"

For those stuck in the dichotomy of print and screen, or the dichotomy of analog and digital, this book is for you. It is an argument that looks beyond these dichotomies, into what binds and frees, of what something is (unbound) when it is not limited to one type of inscription.-- "Instasociety"

In this timely and engaging study, Chasar examines the largely untold story of poetry as it has appeared in various forms of emerging media over the last century and a half . . .This well-written book will have a broad audience.-- "Choice"

By disclosing what are at once poetry's most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry's relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is a poem? The old answers to that query won't hold up in the wake of Chasar's attention to the vulgar afterlives of bookish things.--Daniel Tiffany, author of My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

Poetry is more than a creature of voice, hand, and press, as Chasar shows with verve, wit, insight, and sparkling detail. The public life of poetry in the twentieth-century United States is also a secret history of multimedia. Each medium remakes poetry. And poetry, in turn, remakes the media in which we live, move, and breathe. I love this book!--John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

This is a persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book. Mike Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why and how "poetry matters," and about its place in the wider culture.--Stephanie Burt, author of Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems

With Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar secures his place as our foremost investigator of poetry as a popular practice--ordinary, ubiquitous, and, indeed, fundamental to American cultural life. Poetry is dead; long live poetry, untethered from the constraints of the printed page and in the wilds of new media.--Rita Raley, author of Tactical Media

About the Author

Mike Chasar is associate professor of English at Willamette University. He is the author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (Columbia, 2012) and the coeditor of Poetry After Cultural Studies (2011).