Introduction:The Scales of Poetry Networks Kamran Javadizadeh (bio) and Robert Volpicelli (bio) We live in networks; we think through them. Increasingly, we have been asking questions, both within the academy and without, about the ubiquity of networks in contemporary life: about information exchange, digital media, and social connectivity more broadly construed. Ours is also a time of new questions for literary studies, as the deeply felt presence of such networked living has brought added attention to the ways in which literature not only represents forms of mediation and connection but also operates as its own kind of discourse network (Kittler 1990) or social assemblage (Latour 2005). This attention has even given rise, in recent years, to a new field of inquiry—call it a network studies—devoted to investigating how a "vocabulary of networks" might be usefully applied to a broad swath of modern literature stretching from at least the turn of the last century onward (Beal 2015, 7). In many cases, such literature reflects the experience of authors who were themselves directly bound up with the "new informatic webs" of novel communication and information technologies (Purdon 2016, 16). But at some point during the twentieth century, these network technologies also became so diffuse, so life-shaping that a "feeling of connectedness" began to stand in for the default condition of modern life more generally (Jagoda 2016, 2). [End Page 1] So far the scholarship on literary networks has been highly successful in revealing the fundamental role literature plays in representing our immersion in various forms of networked life. Yet this criticism has also suffered from a certain narrowness of vision with respect to the types of literature that it usually takes up. More specifically, it has tended to privilege the novel and narrative over other possible generic sites—especially poetry—when it comes to locating a networked imaginary. Caroline Levine's standout Forms (2015), while performing much important theoretical work on the subject of networks, offers a representative example of this generic bias. In her analysis of what she calls the "networked form" (115) and its fundamental tension between the point and the whole, Levine briefly casts an eye on the case of Emily Dickinson to illustrate how the "bounded shape" of the poet's notoriously hermetic life both sustained, and was sustained by, the "sprawling network" of her poetry's epistolary circulation (118). However, like many of the other scholars cited above, Levine quickly moves past poetry to direct her most sustained analysis of the network-as-form at the novel—in this case, the "complex heaping of networks" she finds in the narrative of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (115). But what of the heaps of networks to be found in poetry? The networks in poems, the networks of individual poets, the networks that tie the work of poetry to the social fabric? With the aim of building a more substantial conversation around these questions, this special issue focuses on the connective strands that make the world of poetry possible. Undoubtedly, poetry's own purchase on the language of aesthetic autonomy—the image of the poet writing in isolation, the metaphor of the poem-as-island—has contributed to the neglect of its social embeddedness (Epstein 2006, 26). Yet literary history so often confirms that poets—sometimes because of this pursuit of autonomy—have relied heavily on the use of networks in the making and distributing of their work. This special issue showcases just some of these networks in a series of articles devoted to examining the relationship between "poetry" and "networks," and the way these terms might respectively illuminate each other. In the pages that follow, these articles have been organized to unfold historically. And yet, since the connections between them abound, this is only one way of understanding their interrelation. Another way would be to consider the different scales of poetry networks with which they engage. [End Page 2] THE NETWORK AS POETRY The first, and smallest, scale examined is that of the poem itself. In other words, one theoretical approach to thinking about the relationship between poetry and networks has to do with investigating how poems—like novels—produce their own versions of...
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Jan 28, 2020
Klas Rönnbäck 
