What does it mean to be an Internet poet? Since 2010, Steve Roggenbuck, a twenty-six-year-old who lives in rural Maine, has been producing poetry that is made, distributed, and viewed almost exclusively on the Web, taking the form of tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and image macros. He became best known for a series of videos that are a mix of Walt Whitman and Ryan Trecartin, showing Roggenbuck either in bare apartments or out in the forest, manically improvising poems that celebrate the cosmos and our place in it. In one, he screams at a gray sky, “Make something beautiful before you are dead.… Maybe you should stand in the rain! You’re alive right now!” But this ain’t no tree-hugger or Iron John. There’s an intensity and an edge to his work, verging on violence, which is at once terrifying, hypnotic, and completely moving. Roggenbuck uses shaky handheld cameras, hazy inspirational background music, and rough jump cuts. Purposely aping the look of amateur videos strewn across YouTube, they are meticulously crafted infomercials for poetry. In another, Roggenbuck, with his boyish acned face, thick eyebrows, and scruffy hair, stares intensely into the camera and asks, “I’m interested in marketing, but I’m mainly interested in marketing the moon. Do you love the light of the moon, sir? And if you don’t, can I convince you?”
Along with Tao Lin, Roggenbuck is one of the bright stars of Alt Lit, an online writing community that emerged in 2011 and harnesses the casual affect and jagged stylistics of social media as the basis of their works—poems, stories, novels, tweets, and status updates. Its members have produced a body of distinctive literature marked by direct speech, expressions of aching desire, and wide-eyed sincerity. (“language is so cool. i can type out these shapes and you can understand me,” or “Yay! Dolphins are beautiful creatures and will always have a wild spirit. I have been very lucky because I have had the awesome experience of swimming with dolphins twice.”) The poems and stories, published on blogs and Twitter feeds, are usually written in the Internet vernacular of lowercase letters, inverted punctuation, abundant typos, and bad grammar. While other Web-based poetry movements exploit appropriated text—cutting and pasting or scooping vast amounts of preëxisting data—Alt Lit tends to use emo-heavy, homespun language, bearing the urgency and candor of a status update; no sentiment is too trite to be repurposed as poetry.
This month, Roggenbuck’s publishing collective, Boost House, has released the first English-language paperbound anthology of Alt Lit and its siblings weird Twitter (a group of writers who abuse the platform’s hundred-and-forty-character conventions) and Flarf (an early Internet poetry movement). “The YOLO Pages” (YOLO means “you only live once”) feels like the Internet itself, jammed with screen caps of Twitter updates, image macros, and Photoshopped collages that appear between lineated verse, short stories, and blog entries. It’s a wide-ranging anthology of fifty writers, bringing together promising young poets like Luna Miguel and Cassandra Gillig and more established figures like Tao Lin, Patricia Lockwood, and K. Silem Mohammad. Outsiders such as @Horse_ebooks—a popular Twitter feed that was widely believed to be generated by a robot before it was revealed that there was a human composing the tweets—and the pop-singer-cum-model-cum-motivational-speaker Andrew W.K. (represented here by a string of feel-good party tweets) are also thrown into the mix. There’s a remarkable similarity of stylistics—the use of Internet-speak—across the book that ties together this disparate group.
At least half the book is made up of tweets. The best of them are by Jacob Bakkila, a.k.a. Horse_ebooks, whose spirit percolates through the anthology. Beginning in 2010, the astonishingly bizarre spam verbiage spewed forth by the feed seems to have inspired many of the other poets represented here. Bakkila is represented by two dozen tweets. At their best, his tweets read like a contemporary version of haiku: “Their negativity only served to push me deeper into the realms of soap making,” or “HOLY COW!!… DOG TOYS ARE GETTING EXPENSIVE WHY NOT.” Other strong Twitter poems appear by Anthony Peregrine, Bianca Shrimpton, Tom Hank, Martin Bell, and Patricia Lockwood, whose poem in its entirety reads, “I’m selling my body on Craigslist — not for sex, but because it’s haunted.” They’re useful examples of how much feeling and humor can be packed into this compressed form.
Amid vomit jokes and image macros of cats, there are poems that obliquely grapple with bigger issues of mortality, politics, feminism, capitalism, and the environment, such as Santino Dela’s beautiful “no raindrop / feels responsible / for the flood,” and Catalina Gallagher’s up-to-the-minute conundrum, “how can i somehow…use selfies..to stop climate change…” Martin Bell’s tweets are the most explicitly political, echoing the truisms of Jenny Holzer: “holding your newborn for the first time thinking about how he’ll just be another anonymous employee for the rest of his life someday,” or “we didn’t crawl out of the ocean to punch the clock.”
This type of writing has deep roots, extending back to the cosmological visions of William Blake, through the direct observation poems of the Imagists, the anti-art absurdities of Dada, and the nutty playfulness of Surrealism. In the second half of the twentieth century, a major touchstone is the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg’s spontaneous mind poems, Jack Kerouac’s unfiltered spew, and Gary Snyder’s environmental consciousness. The concrete poet Aram Saroyan’s purposely misspelled single-word poem “lighght” and James Joyce’s compounded verbiage in “Finnegans Wake” are models for much of the word play that occurs throughout the book (gorgeous moments like the reimagining of the words “can,t” and “youuuuu”). Even the scattered emoticons and ASCII constellations take on a Joycean tint. While Roggenbuck is steeped in the histories of modern art and literature, and K. Silem Mohammad is an English professor, it’s unclear how consciously many of these writers are referencing their high-tone predecessors. But there’s a punk-inspired outlaw energy rippling through much of the work here.
In his video “‘AN INTERNET BARD AT LAST!!!’ (ARS POETICA)”, Roggenbuck talks about his debt to the past. “Five and a half years ago, I read Walt Whitman and it changed my life,” he says. “Walt Whitman had made me appreciate my life more actively than I had ever appreciated it before. Walt makes you step back and say, the world is wonderful, this whole thing that is going on is wonderful. Pay attention to what is going on.” Technology is the key. “The purpose of the Bard is my purpose,” he says. “This is the dream for poets, to be a poet when the Internet exists. Man! We got an opportunity!” The video concludes with Roggenbuck connecting the past and present: “You know that Walt Whitman would die for this, that Walt Whitman would be on a TweetDeck, kicking his legs up, and going ha-a-a-ard.”
