Streaming verse: Looking into the mirror

Abstract

In this article, I investigate the way multiple contemporary poets incorporate the medium of television and its many genres into their poems. I take as a starting point the continuing centrality of television in the way contemporary culture seeks to both represent and understand itself and examine the way that poetry takes on the challenge of addressing this ubiquitous medium. By incorporating and responding to mass media, the poetry of television is likewise seeking to understand contemporary culture and the poet’s place within it. In examining texts by Susan Stewart, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine and Bianca Stone, I consider the appearance of television as both mythologising force and, in the age of 24-hour news and live streaming, ambient noise, while examining the ways that these poets move between description, critical observation and interpretation, and active mimesis. In the slippage between these approaches, we see the poets undertaking the act of ‘audiencing’ (Turnbull, 2020, p. 13), shifting between passive and active modes of engagement.