Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?

Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.

With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.

Reviews of The Poem Electric

“Perlow is an adroit, incisive close reader of poems by both canonical and contemporary poets . . . His writing is always lively and insightful, his many speculative ideas always interesting. . . . Throughout the book, Perlow is attentive to exactly how readers and scholars encounter poems now that digital technology is our medium of inquiry. . . . The Poem Electric (2018) does what good criticism does: it helps us think differently about familiar texts, recognize influences we have not noticed before, and leaves us with many insights that can be developed further.”

— Peter Middleton, American Literary History (full review)

“Skeptical of received critical accounts, at ease with philosophical and formal complexity, always driving toward greater conceptual rigor, The Poem Electric rewards its reader. At a time when many of us are contending with the ubiquity of digital tools and ever bigger data, Perlow’s work reminds us that poets have long gleaned inspiration from technology that appears, on first glance, resolutely unpoetic. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of postwar American poetry and those working at the intersection of media studies with literary studies, although anyone tracking the fortunes of the lyric — as critical term and as creative practice — will also find much of it valuable.”

— Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Genre (full review)

“Perlow’s criticism is smart, sensible, and interdisciplinary. The book successfully reaches its objective to join technologically oriented interpretation and conventional literary hermeneutics. . . . Further, beyond its worth as piece of literary criticism, The Poem Electric secondarily offers insightful critique concerning Digital Humanities scholarship to date.”

— Christopher T. Funkhouser, Rain Taxi (full review)

“The Poem Electric is an important book. It radically displaces the discussion on lyricism . . . Perlow has managed to bridge the gap between very different strands of lyrical and antilyrical thinking. His book is a major contribution to a new way of thinking modernism and experimentalism, deprived of any easy antagonism between progressive antisubjectivism and a more traditional sense of the reading and writing lyric subject.”

— Jan Baetens, Image (&) Narrative (Belgium)

“The accurate analysis of the verses is enjoyably paralleled by a detailed description of the social and cultural context, including the technologies involved and their effects. In the end Perlow provides an important contribution to the complex relationship between literature and media, enhancing their processual nature and exploring their relationship through a media archeological approach.”

— Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural (Italy)

Advance Praise for The Poem Electric

What happens to the lyric imagination in our new “computational environment”? Seth Perlow confronts a central paradox of postmodernity: a poem, on the one hand understood as “a small (or large) machine made of words” (William Carlos Williams), is, on the other, devoted to resisting the inherent rationalism of that machine. Indeed, the “afterlife of the lyric,” as Perlow argues in a series of fascinating case studies ranging from Emily Dickinson to Jackson Mac Low and Amiri Baraka, is one of lyric exemption—the resistance to absorption into normative discourse channels. Frank O’Hara’s poems, for example, may well claim to be “like” telephone calls, but their actual articulation is one of depersonalization and replacement rather than imitation. Casting a wide net, The Poem Electric is a highly original investigation of how “electronics enable poets and their readers to animate and rework, rather than reject and surpass, familiar lyric norms.

— Marjorie Perloff

Seth Perlow presents a magnificent challenge to the current fashion of “big data” and mathematized literary analysis. The Poem Electric shows how qualitative, lyric intensities embody dispositions that are of indispensable value to us, and which are in productive tension with the world of screens and memes that we inhabit. It represents a wonderful challenge to so many of our assumptions about the value of technology to the humanities and the place of the lyric in our technologized lifeworlds.

— Joel Nickels

By examining the “afterlives of the lyric” through their relation to modern positivism—or, more accurately, the “equipment” of rationalism—Seth Perlow ventures into territory rarely visited by theorists and critics. He seeks to identify the rationalized “objecthood” of the lyric poem by pairing it with a series of electronic tools. He does so by repeatedly tracing a dialectical movement by which poetry’s “exemption from rationalism” is exposed as a fallacy by its transactions with various devices and emblems of techno-rationalism: digital archives of audio and visual files, for example, or computer-generated lists of random numbers. Perlow’s critical anatomies can produce startling effects, as when his examination of the figure of the telephone in Frank O’Hara’s poetry reveals not O’Hara’s ebullient sociality (as we have been taught to believe), but a disturbing condition of anonymity and a-sociality. Remarkable for its close reflections and readings of unfamiliar texts, The Poem Electric helps to articulate a field of compelling interest.

— Daniel Tiffany