Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives - ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic - the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry. The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of "official verse culture," refers to as "frame lock" and "tone jam." While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with "screen memory" (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of "found" materials.

Introduction Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy, New MediaChapter OneMedium as Messenger: Hannah Weiner Anchors the Social Poetics of 1986 in Weeks Chapter TwoA Blizzard of Snowflakes: Kenneth Goldsmith as Conceptualist at the Cusp of a Digital Age in SoliloquyChapter Three(In)decisive Moments: On Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters Chapter Four"The wound track shows deeper hemorrhage": Kenneth Goldsmith's "The Body of Michael Brown" as The Eighth American DisasterChapter FiveGaps in the Machine: Andrei Codrescu's Unarchival PoeticsChapter Six"Needing to Summon the Others": Archival Research as Séance in Susan Howe's Spontaneous Particulars Chapter SevenBad Company, Meet Sonic Youth: On Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox: Social Media, Post Language Conceptual Poetics, and the Ethics of Online AppropriationChapter EightA Tonalism, Synaesthesia, Translation, and Post-Ableism in The Route Chapter NineWhat Makes Poetry Happen: The Erotics of Literary Activism in an Age of Internet VirusBibliographyIndex