This month’s blogger on the Poetry Foundations’s blog, Tyrone Williams, shares his thoughts on post-humanism as it relates to technology’s effects on students and readers of poetry. He writes:
What I’m trying to gesture toward is the receding horizon of our concept of the “human” and our efforts to hold onto it even as our technological developments make every generation nostalgic for what it perceives as the “humanist” values a present (that is, young) generation cannot appreciate. Indeed, as technological developments around communication accelerate, their cumulative “shock” engenders the backlash of nostalgia at an increasingly younger and younger age.
I read this and I recall how many times I’ve heard people say, “I love my e-reader, but nothing beats a good book”. Advancements happen so quickly that even the younger of us look back wistfully at how things used to be. But what does this have to do with poetry?
Because so many students, like most Americans, have either (or sometimes both) a nostalgic or jaundiced view of poetry (almost always connected to either a “wonderful” or “terrible” memory of reading poetry in school), they tend to mark poems as too anachronistic in language and sentiment (now I remember why I don’t like poetry) or too “academic,” too intellectual (see Cal Bedient’s essay in The Boston Review a few months ago).
Is longing for the days when poetry did such and such hurting its public reception? That’s something to consider. Read the rest of Williams’ post here.
