<i>Poetic Acts & New Media</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetic Acts & New Media Tom Rechtin (bio) Poetic Acts & New Media by Tom O’Connor; University Press of America, 2007 As film, television, and now the Internet dominate the media landscape in contemporary American culture, one might question the relevance of such a time-honored form of artistic expression as poetry. After all, aside from a select few people, who writes poetry, much less reads the stuff? However, as Tom O’Connor illustrates in his book Poetic Acts & New Media, poetry not only remains crucially relevant in our contemporary world, but the very conception of “poetry” as a verbal form of artistic expression oftentimes discounts the presence of poetry in other more popular forms of media where poetry, due to the often codified status of meaning, is vastly needed. Indeed, much of O’Connor’s focus lies on exploring poetry not as a verbal form of artistic expression, but in those forms of media that dominate the popular culture’s consciousness and that have historically encouraged a limiting, representational mode of thinking fundamentally antithetical to the nature of “poetry.” Utilizing the writings of Gilles Deleuze, O’Connor identifies “poetry” as a simulated form of expression that generates meaning within the contingent, contextual circumstances of its making. Thus, in “poetry,” no meaning is predetermined, making its worldview fundamentally in opposition to the far more “popular” approach toward meaning that a “representational” view offers. For the latter, meaning has already been codified or preestablished, as the sign and the real are assumed to be equivalent. One is left to simply abide by a logic that denies how meaning had been generated or “simulated” into being. Thus, a representational perspective fundamentally discounts [End Page 196] life as contingent by nature, and in doing so, offers answers or “meanings” that may not apply or may even be harmful to those living by them. It is with this in mind that O’Connor turns toward poetry as not only relevant in contemporary American culture, but vital for its participants. The fact that “poetry” exists beyond its traditional verbal confines in various more popular forms of media illustrates not only how poetry indeed can be “popular,” but also how its presence in more popular forms of media is essential toward counteracting the “dominant” mode of representational thinking that seeks to maintain a stranglehold on meaning. However, before O’Connor embarks on a discussion of “poetry” in various modes of expression other than the verbal, he rightly begins his discussion by applying his definition of “poetry” to the traditional verbal medium of poetry. Specifically, O’Connor highlights how his notion of “poetry” operates within the traditional verbal medium of poetry through an analysis of the work of “media” poet David Trinidad, who, throughout his poetry, “toy[s] with the apparent meanings of many taken-for-granted cultural appearances” (34). At the same time, O’Connor also distinguishes “media poetry” (the neologism for his specific conception of “poetry”) from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which also wishes to distance itself from a representational mode of thinking. While O’Connor’s “media poetry” conceives of verbal expression as generating Deleuzian Sense-events that are real but not predetermined, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry conceives of verbal language as consisting of a series of arbitrary signs that do not refer to reality but, at best, only themselves. In this way, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry conceives of all meaning as necessarily unfixed and arbitrary in nature, a stance that, while in opposition to a representational mode of thinking, also stands in opposition to O’Connor’s “media poetry,” which conceives of meaning not as arbitrary, but rather as contingent upon context and thereby the very real, lived moment of its creation. Having established the position of “media poetry” within the verbal medium of poetry, O’Connor then shifts his attention to the presence of “media poetry” in the cinema through a discussion of three films: Mulholland Drive, Vanilla Sky, and Being John Malkovich. Here, however, O’Connor’s emphasis rests not solely on the progression or development of each film as a mode of simulation, but...