Abstract: This paper explores poet C. S. Giscombe's representations of road infrastructures in Giscome Road (1998). It understands the road as the material trace and political form of settler colonialism and Black geographic presence in the British Columbia Interior. It then argues that the collection's roads affectively bind the speaker to an experience of place through a matrix of racialization that infrastructure itself articulates and perpetuates. Rather than treating roads as symbolic motifs or historical backdrops, Giscombe turns to infrastructural networks as structuring conditions for racialization and subjectivization and, within the poem itself, for syntax, spatial orientation, and archival logic. This paper explores how infrastructure's binding qualities denote a range of complex affective commitments that reflect infrastructure's processes of racialization but also exceed these determinations as a quiet infrastructural optimism.
Abstract: Emily Hunt's long poem "Company" (2019) transcribes in autopsical focus the hasty skilling, drudgery, waste, precarity, and hard-pressed intimacies that gave shape, day after day, to the poet's stint as an employee of BloomThat, an app-based flower delivery start-up. Turning inside-out the timeworn analogy of poetry to flowers, "Company" is a superbly wry meditation on waged labor in a platform economy. More specifically, Hunt applies the hyperrealist grip of her verse to the task of registering a particular feeling endemic to the Global North: the infrastructural creep of the platform as a dominant mode of capitalization. Integrating two different critical approaches to infrastructure, this essay demonstrates how "Company" takes a scene of high decadence—the traffic in flowers in San Francisco, the seat of digital capitalism—and uses it to plumb a set of ambivalent feelings about the social world that many readers will recognize as the very air they breathe.
Abstract: This article addresses Canadian poet bpNichol and Brazilian artist-poet Paulo Bruscky and their work with photocopiers and fax machines during the 1980s. I argue that Bruscky and bpNichol can help us extract the fax and photocopier from a critical reception distorted by the subsequent infrastructural transformations that brought us the Internet. Rather than spurring networked connectivity, bpNichol and Bruscky push poetry through the copier and the fax in order to say nothing, to convey no information, to produce no workplace output, while using the workplace's informational supports. In doing so, they gum the gears of the information infrastructures arising in tandem with late-twentieth-century capital.
Abstract: What does the rise of digital curation algorithms mean for contemporary poetry? For artists marginalized by traditional publishing industries, digital platforms open critical publication opportunities. Yet the algorithmic curation of social media platforms reinforces hegemonic norms and biases. In this article, I ask: What promises and risks do social media platforms pose to poets from the Global South? How might poetic form reflect, or challenge, the rise of platform infrastructures? And what tools do literary scholars have for assessing the impact of algorithms? I draw together recent work in platform studies with long-standing discussions about editorial power in African literature to propose a cross-platform, comparative approach to examining the influence of algorithmic curation on contemporary poetry. Focusing on Malawian poetry, this analysis reveals how writers work within algorithmic infrastructure to challenge the normative categories by which their work is evaluated. In responding to algorithms as infrastructure, poetic form—which invites ambivalence and interpretation—promises a way out from within the apparent omnipresence of algorithmic organizations.
Abstract: Helen Vendler (2020) describes the buried cognitive and affective features that give rise to a poem's visible linguistic form as "imaginative infrastructure." I extend Vendler's term to compass the concrete structures that shape mental life in a poet's city. I begin by recapitulating debates in poetics and urban theory in order to demonstrate that both disciplines contribute to a common conversation about the role of aesthetic form. For poets, the dislocations of urban renewal threatened what James Merrill called the "dear premises" of personal and social history. "An Urban Convalescence" (1962) copes with a threat to Merrill's "imaginative infrastructure" by adapting Romantic landscape poetry to the dissolving topography of postwar Manhattan. I conclude with Gwendolyn Brooks's 1968 elegy for Mecca Flats, an ornate apartment building that provided the armature for Black sociability in Chicago. In recovering the formal elaboration of the Mecca's social infrastructure, Brooks's "baroque style" revises the tradition of "artificial" elegy.
