Through the Looking Glass: Poetry in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Writing about the relationship between the Internet, digital technologies and poetry and poetics within the context of changing ideas of space can be both a beguiling and a baffling process. It is beguiling in the sense that the spaces produced by the Internet and digital technologies are both a symbol of the spatial turn and a significant part of its production. The Internet redefines relationships between space and place, changes relationships between people and places, breaks down relationships between space and time and supports processes of globalization. The body may be in one place while the mind is in another and experience decreasingly takes place in the place in which the body is located. Surfing the Internet applies ideas of the ‘nomadic’ in the way one can apparently move freely around the Internet without a home and where home is always with you. The structure of the Internet itself is ‘rhizomatic’; it can be broken into at any point and has no centre or periphery. The Internet and digital technologies also produce spaces within which a variety of ideas about literature and ‘literary theory’ can be applied and examined; hypertext is both an application and a demonstration of intertextuality and of the importance of context to the production and reception of texts.