The Virtual Poem Embodied on Screen

Why preserve poetry readings on film and in video recordings if poetry is largely an aural medium? What do we gain by seeing a poet read her work on screen or potentially lose? To answer these questions, this project examines online archives of audiovisual recordings of poetry performances from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, James Madison University’s Furious Flower Archive, The Library of Congress, SpokenWeb, and PBS Television. I use Alan Grossman’s theory of the virtual poem, and its recent reception by Ben Lerner and Langdon Hammer to discuss how on-screen performances may make this “virtual poem” legible through embodiment. In doing so, I will create a digital edition of “The Virtual Poem Embodied on Screen” that compares audio and video recordings through annotation on the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow and ultimately prepare a manuscript based on my findings for a journal in digital humanities.