Social Media Poetics: The Technological Forms of Alt Lit Poetry

Abstract

Social Media Poetics:The Technological Forms of Alt Lit Poetry Justin Tonra (bio) "140+140!" was the tweet that heralded a defining change to Twitter. On November 7, 2017, Twitter founder JACK DORSEY announced that the maximum length of a tweet would be increased to 280 characters from its previous limit of 140. The change was intended to remove a constraint that was perceived to hinder expression, leading to abandoned tweets among English language users.1 For a business model based on the aggregation of data for the purposes of advertising and data licensing, abandoned tweets represented unrealized commercial potential. However, for poets who had used Twitter's 140-character constraint to draft and publish lines of verse, the change was not so profitable. In the last decade, social media has proved an unexpectedly rich breeding ground for certain poets to publish and promote their poetry. Rupi Kaur has primarily used Instagram to share her poetry, selling more than eleven million copies of her books since her self-published debut, milk and honey (2014). With other poets achieving fame and commercial success on other platforms, the phenomenon of social media poetry has resulted in a dizzying blend of egalitarian publishing opportunity, canny marketing, and an assemblage of "scammers and opportunists and ironists."2 However, many writers from the Alt Lit movement have also used social [End Page 597] media platforms as catalysts for creative inspiration and formal experiment. This movement, whose heyday was the first half of the 2010s, was characterized by online- and self-publication and by its authors' relentless social media activity. Primarily an online community, its leading contributors made successful transitions to print with major publishers. Alt Lit authors mined their personal data archives for their printed works, charging their writing with a distinctive aesthetic whose trace is preserved in the process of their works' remediation from digital media to print. Creating their work in the course of this platform-hopping, these writers take a unique poetic measure of our social media landscape. A social media poetics has emerged in Alt Lit, found at the intersection of three important aspects of the movement: an examination of its contemporary relevance; an analysis of the lyricization process that takes place when social media posts are remediated for the printed page; and a delineation of Alt Lit's poetic genealogy, which encompasses Charles Olson and the Beats, their relationships with technology, and the formal influence of subsequent developments in the history of communication technologies. Section 1 provides a brief history of Alt Lit's rise and fall, highlighting features of the movement that illustrate its contemporary relevance and recommend it for analysis and critique in the current moment. Two longer sections augment these claims for significance with arguments that situate Alt Lit within the context of past and present poetic theories and practices. Section 2 combines close readings with the framework of lyric reading to reveal shifts that occur when text that originates on social media is reworked for poetry's printed page. During this process, a solitary speaking voice that invites a lyric reading is foregrounded. At the same time, however, the verse line preserves an essential formal relationship with the social media post that is concealed by the logic of lyric reading. Finally, section 3 positions Alt Lit writers as successors to a developing tradition, articulated by Olson and [End Page 598] consolidated by the Beats, which linked the verse line with the poet's breath. Principles similar to those that informed Olson's theory featured prominently in the development of mobile communications technologies so that a distinct line connects these poetic theories and practices, and their engagements with technology, to Alt Lit. Together, these three sections identify and analyze the contemporary and historic underpinnings of the social media poetics that characterize Alt Lit. ALT LIT TODAY During its peak in the 2010s, Alt Lit (sometimes hyphenated) attracted equal measures of acclaim and disdain. While detractors characterized the movement as the work of "boring, infantile narcissists," other critics celebrated its tonal and stylistic emulation of social media by "the first group of young writers grappling with the constant presence of the Internet."3 Although the movement was relatively...