Digital Genre

I want to respond to Erin Costello’s blog and her questions on aesthetics in digital poetry. If there is one thing that an MFA student should be able to see is what other MFA students deem as “good writing.” We might not always be able to define why something is written well or written poorly, but when it is there, we know it. Digital poetry however is a new genre, even though it has technically been around our entire lives. The usual envelopment in the texts does not transfer to the digital realm. I think this has a lot to do with the new language one has to learn in order to write in a digital medium, and synthesizing the two can be a very tough task indeed. Perhaps the term digital poetry is throwing us off. This is really a whole new genre, one that abides by its own rules, just as fiction has different rules from non-fiction or film, and because this is a whole new genre, we have to create new guidelines for determining what is good. Our innate sense of good writing will most likely guide us here, but also our senses have not really been bolstered by years and years of other people guiding us to what is good. We are going to have to be those people for the next generation. So we better start figuring out this genre, and do it fast.