The Reception of Poetry in the World of Informatics

We live in a world where poetry occupies a marginal place in social interest. Indeed, poetry has seldom been a driving force for change in any human community, and today, its public power is more cryptic than ever. While the impact of this marginalisation on poetry itself remains debatable, the consequences for society are undeniably detrimental. Society, much like an organism, required sleep and a vision that extends beyond the horizon. Without that, organisms either fail to survive or devolve to mare physiology. Despite the poetry’s diminished role in public life, poets continue to emerge and create, and the need for effective promotion remains. The advent of digital technology and the internet in the 21st century has provided numerous forms of individual contact with the public sphere. Poets, too, have found their opportunities here. Websites, portals and blogs dedicated to poetry have quickly become a forest where you can’t see the trees. The rise of social networks has further amplified the phenomenon of digital poetry publishing, easily making literary magazines and journals in physical form anachronistic, even repulsive, to new generations of poets and potential readers. Here lies a paradox: while there is, indeed, a lot of poetry in the space of social networks, its influence is diminishing. Publishing poetry online is a simple, accessible and cost-free endeavour, attracting many, particularly young poets, who see social networks as an opportunity for quick access to reader reception. Let’s say this is one of the advantages that literature gains with the arrival of digital media. In a world dictated by information, poetry is now able to seek space for its visibility. And this would all be great if we didn’t have to acknowledge that the influence of poetry diminishes with its increased presence in everyday communication on social networks. How can this be measured? It is true that there is no measurement system for this. There are only subjective considerations. Yet, we know that human truth is usually the quotient of subjective understandings and collective agreement with their resulting average. In this sense, we conclude that poetry is deprived of its suggestiveness and influence just because of its excessive exposure. Imagine your daily activity on a social network. They are, of course, created so that their nature is determined by some kind of algorithmic deity. Your encounter with certain content will depend on your search tendencies, and so will the choice of people you communicate with. There are a huge number of people on social networks who meet poetry this way only. They will rarely read poetry from books or periodicals. They do not attend poetry programs or festivals. So, poetry is a random content for short-term use for a large part of the public. There is no doubt that this can produce a pleasant moment of consumption. However, an ad for a vacation or a charming video of someone feeding a pet will have the same effect. Poetry comes down to a piece of information about something. And it truly is, only in a completely different sense. Poetry is information that opens the way to the inner spiritual development of an individual. Reading poetry is an inner transformative dialogue. If this is how we understand things, the question arises: why does increased presence of poetic texts on social networks decrease the significance of poetry in the public space? We might say it is due to the way we approach the act of reading. Namely, there is a difference between premeditated reading and reading as an incidental, random act. We have already mentioned that there is a large population of poetry readers who read verses in digital space only, and that, not as a reading choice but as a result of an accidental encounter. A poem has a convenient form for quick and incidental reading. It requires only a minute or two of reading dedication. If poetry coexists in a context of news of a friend’s birthday celebration or a new shampoo advertisement, the poetry is dragged by such informative environment into the same perceptual level. The psychology of content adoption is closely tied to the concept of the content source. The selection of content importance is oriented accordingly. Therefore, the very act of reading poetry on social networks becomes a consumer activity, subject to relativisation. Content accepted incidentally, even if it is a beautiful reading incident, is condemned to short-lived experience in our memory. This reminds us of Borges’ words and his attitude towards reading the daily press in the capacity of a manner to be part of the general course of events: ‘Newspapers are read only to be forgotten.’

The subject of this text is not the intention to dispute the significance that modern communication technologies have for the promotion of poetry. On the contrary. The objective is to point out to the different forms of reception of poetic texts, both to their advantages and disadvantages. The famous Serbian neo-symbolist poet Branko Miljković has a verse: ‘Poetry will be written by everyone.’ This is one of his most frequently quoted verses. At the same time, the relevance of this verse also relates to mass publishing of poetry on social networks. Miljković lived a very short life (27 years). He died in 1961, and probably could not have foreseen the dimensions of today’s world of informatics. Not everyone writes poetry, but in present conditions, anyone who writes can easily make it available in the space of public discourse. As attractive as it may sound behind such a concept lies a rather dystopian image of hyperproduction of ‘artistic’ content. In one of his essays, Czesław Miłosz says that almost every technological innovation has its reflections on art and culture in the context of social circumstances. The advent of radio, given as an example by Miłosz, provided the opportunity for opera or famous symphonies to be also heard by those who did not have the chance to attend concert halls. On the other hand, the possibility of recording and reproducing sound and voice gave way for populist music production. Several years ago, a study about the YouTube mentioned that it would take 63 years for a person to watch and listen to the amount of content posted on this medium daily. If we talk about literature, especially poetry, we could read it from books or literary journals only until two and a half decades ago. Thus, from the moment the text was created to the moment it appeared before the reader, there was a whole series of jobs, a long chain of professional actions to be done and decisions to be made. Publishing poetry on social networks is like skipping an important evolutionary chain. There are no editors, no proofreaders, no publishing plan, no relevant critical review... On the contrary, reader reactions are immediate and value-reduced to a few emoticons. All this provides the author with a deceptive satisfaction and a sense of live presence in the life of literary community. It is hard to imagine that such reception can have a long-term effect on the reader. The certainty of inner change that reading poetry gradually produces is quite questionable. This is why the essence of poetry is almost the opposite of the concept of social media hypertext: poetry is a slow medium, requiring engaged reading and demanding interactivity not under the influence of content coming from outside but interactivity with the inner self. Hence, the poetic text imposed in an abundance of random contents is deprived of the magical effect of change. Yes, a person who reads poetry has certain cultural and other developmental advantages over a person who does not. But if the only contact with poetry is made in the area of social networks, poetry then becomes a mare superficial aesthetic moment, a simple reading decoration. ‘Everything near becomes far,’ says Goethe, and this paradox can also be considered in the phenomenon of reception of poetic text on social networks. In principle, it is a special ‘spiritual vision’ that a true reader of poetry develops when in contact with a lyrical poem. This Goethe’s ‘near’ is result produced in the space of inner Me by reading poetry. As already mentioned, the power of poetry lies in the fact that it transforms the reading subject from the inside. The distancing of the near is, in fact, the expansion of perspective in the understanding of the world and reality. A whole new horizon of understanding opens up. Here, of course, we talk about continuous and dedicated reading of poetry. On the other hand, exposure to the effects of poetry that reaches us as a segment of media hypertext in the whirlpool of other information has no such effect. In that case, there is a lot of redundancy and ‘static on the line’. The actual process of content adoption is burdened by the psychology of ephemerality.

All this said above has a special connotation when it comes to young creators and the new reading audience. We are facing the fact that there is a global ‘reading crisis’. This is particularly true for reading poetry books. The mentioned crisis is partly caused by the need to get information quickly and without too much effort. On the other hand, social networks and the internet have made poetry very present in the area of electronic publishing, leading to the hyperproduction of poetic texts. This is a kind of simulacrum, an illusion of poetry being a part of everyday life, resulting in quite a refusal of a number of young poets to participate in it. Therefore, they try to get affirmed through various forms of activism and cultural guerrilla. There are many examples of self-organisation of young poetic groups and movements in Serbia, especially in larger cities. Public readings are organised at various urban locations, mostly outside mainstream environments. Poetry is published in the form of booklets, flyers or fanzines, trying to find their way to authenticity. Literary evenings are extremely informal and open. This points to the need for new emerging poets to escape the traps of publishing on social networks. It seems they understand well, at the intuitive level at least, the sterility that comes from this way of affirmation. On the other hand, they also refuse to be part of a general cultural policy. They do not trust the academically intonated literary scene and the anachronistic festival models of poetry promotion. It seems absurd, but we get an impression that the latest generation of young poets exhibits a regressive reflex when it comes to the possibilities of publishing poetry on social networks. They are intensively moving from the world of electronic media into the realm of live contact, poetic gatherings and debates. Therefore, alternative small publishing houses are emerging that pay attention to the marginalised poetic life. Perhaps, in the near future we will witness a paradigm shift regarding the social visibility of poetic texts. It is likely that Facebook, for instance, will remain a field for measuring creative egos and superficial vanity. In contrast, we will have small publishing corridors connecting valuable creators with a genuine readership. One thing is certain: poetry will continue to emerge, and the forms of its visibility and influence will depend on many social trends and circumstances. In any case, the relationship between poetry and social networks is already a valuable and important indicator for understanding the key features of the world we live in. It is fast, noisy and superficial world. Art, and especially poetry as the highest achievement of language, is always in defence of meaning. However, poetry can only help a reader who is capable and willing to think with their own head. True poetry never declaims or preaches. Its greatest power lies in leading the reader into a state of reflection. An individual of today is blasted all over with calls for superficiality and easy entertainment. No deep attention, critical thinking or vitality of the inner world is required for this. Addressing poetry is a kind of search for the truth, not with a belief that truth will be found in a verse, a beautiful poetic image, or an idea itself, but rather in the elevated state of foreboding that good poetry almost always brings us to. In conclusion of this text, we will say that, for this very reason, poetry deserves a proper manner of readership reception. Randomly reading verses from social networks can only serve as a good initiation into a more serious interaction with poetry. Metaphorically speaking: we are always saddened by the sight of a beautiful animal world behind bars, in a zoo. Fortunately, far away from there, a whole universe of authentic and free-living world still exists.

Translated by Željko Andrijanić

Proofread by Jelena Đoković