Insitution email:   simon.pomery.2015@live.rhul.ac.uk

Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Digital Poetics (2001) is an historical text for how to read and understand digital poetry. He also argues that digital poetics is not separate from print, but is part of the fabric of our poetic reading of the world, and is inextricably linked to the development of technology. Taking this as a starting point I will trace a history of thought process in recent innovative poetry. Andrew Michael Roberts and his recent AHRC-funded ‘Poetry Beyond Text’ project laid the foundations for the interdisciplinary reading of poetry through cognitive science. Building on Roberts’s research, this project assumes that we can use the language of neurolinguistics, the intersection of mental and linguistic functioning, to explain how poetry works, and, in turn, how poetics illuminates thought process.
In particular, I would like to fuse contemporary findings on the interaction of syntactic and semantic
processes in the mind, and apply scientific concepts to literary techniques. Jump-cuts, collage, digression, multiple voices, metaphors, and political questions, are traversed quickly in experimental texts, in a way similar to the speed with which the digital viewer accesses multiple browser windows.
I will propose that we can apply recent findings in neurolinguistics to the literary study of recent multimedia poetry. My violation-based method will follow the speed of thought process in innovative poetries, looking at linguistic violation and disruption in syntactic and semantic rules across poetical forms and modes that make use of various technologies: digital, conceptual, visual, and sound poetry.