Expanding Verse : Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media

Abstract

Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan’s media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media. “Approaches the history of modern Japanese literature from an entirely new angle—media ecologies of poetry. The result is nothing less than an alternative history of literature in Japan as well as a history of media that is by turns surprising and deeply satisfying.” THOMAS LAMARRE, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media “Expanding Verse is original, timely, and substantial. Warm and inviting— readers will be left feeling much informed about the poets’ respective lives, challenges, and adventures.” ATSUKO SAKAKI, author of Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory “This book impresses on every page as a stunning work of scholarly rigor and innovative thinking. Andrew Campana rethinks the literary form, challenging us to reconfigure literary and media studies.” JONATHAN E. ABEL, author of The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji