An excerpt from Amaranth Borsuk’s introduction to Affect & Audience in the Digital Age which records conversations between Sarah Dowling, Kate Durbin, Craig Dworkin, Ray Hsu, Brian Reed & Rachel Zolf, and includes an afterward by Gregory Laynor.
From database aesthetics, to online communities, to crowdsourced projects, our invited guests interrogated the relationship of their own work to our titular keywords: Affect & Audience in the Digital Age. This one-day symposium on “scholarly, pedagogical, curatorial, and creative practices that attend to the digitally mediated character of contemporary poetry” was an initial foray into what has become an ongoing collaborative workgroup exploring the intersection of poetry, performance and public scholarship… We chose panelists whose work defies stereotypes of such data-driven or digitally mediated writing as authorless, emotionless and anti-lyrical. In their work, we sense the“powerful feelings” upon which Wordsworth built his poetics, even if the source of these feelings is not the “emotion recollected in tranquility” with which such writing is traditionally associated.