English

Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-247) and index.

"Throughout the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first poetry has seemingly taken an increasingly insignificant role in our culture as radio, film, television, and the internet have become dominant. Mike Chasar challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that poetry isn't dying, dead, or marginalized, but rather that it has gone off the page where its cultural impact can be seen in the histories of the magic lantern, radio, film, and television. Audiences haven't vanished but the ways we experience and encounter poetry have changed. Mass and non-print media haven't stolen poetry's audiences but have opened up audiences to more types of poetry in more media formats. Moreover, new media has not only changed the way people experience poems but poetry helps and continues to broker and secure the place of emergent media in American culture. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through to the emergence of the internet and karaoke, Chasar examines the ways in which poetry was integrated with and employed by new media. He shows how the magic lantern went from a medium used primarily to frighten audiences to one that used poetry in schools and religious setting. He also considers how early cinema drew on poetry to legitimize itself as an art form and then how directors would turn to poetry in films to turn the act of solitary reading of poetry in a dramatic moment in which viewers experience the poem in a new context and how movies demonstrate their superior capabilities as a "poetry-reading machine." Chasar's book allows us to understand the history of poetry's reception and its place in American culture and media that moves beyond the book and takes on new lives and meanings via emergent technologies"--,Provided by publisher.

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