On July 1-4, I will be giving a talk, presiding a panel, and offering a workshop at the BAMS/MSA Joint Conference in Loughborough, UK. The conference focus is Weird Modernisms.

Presentation: “When Vers is Libre from the Page” — July 1, 2026

Modernist poetics of innovation occurred in the context of print technologies and led to experimentation with poetic form, typography, the use of the typewriter, and the normalization of free verse. Digital media technologies offer opportunities for further experimentation in poetic form, extending Modernism well into the 21st century. This paper builds on Marjorie Perloff’s 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002) and Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (2014) to identify ways in which digital poetry continues the Modernist project by innovating poetic writing and form in ways that leverage digital media’s capabilities. This includes writing with variables to incorporate randomization in computer generated text, the presentation of poetic lines in time and space as seen in videopoetry, textual movement in kinetic typography, the incorporation of the readers’ input in interactive textual interfaces, and other ways in which programming can be used to rethink free verse beyond the limits of the print or virtual page. Given the naturalization of the printed and virtual page in education and literature and the secondary orality of performance poetry delivered through sound and video based media, digital poetry comes across as weird, uncanny, strange for readers whose literacy training and aesthetic values are built on older media forms, such as print, voice, and the body. And yet, the way in which poetic form can be reimagined for digital media gives hope for the continuing influence of Modernist poetics and poetic innovation.

⛶ Fullscreen ⧉ Open presentation

Panel Moderation: “Modernist Poetics and the Digital” — July 2, 2026

This panel of four papers by scholars from Canada, the US and Poland, considers modernism from different points in time in relation to digital media, from its origins to its afterlife, looking at digital visualization from a myriad of perspectives.

E-Poetry Workshop — July 3, 2026

In this workshop, participants will learn two things: how to adapt an e-poem to use its form to create new works, and how to use AI to generate code to create new poetic forms that take advantage of the affordances of digital media. E-poetry is an experimental practice that extends Modernist poetics into digital media by creating new poetic forms that incorporate text generation, interactivity, animation, multimodality, networked data, and other aspects of digital culture. In the first part of the workshop we will use published open-access works, such as “Taroko Gorge” by Nick Montfort (https://nickm.com/poems/taroko_gorge/), and learn how to modify the code to create new poems based on the original’s e-poetic form. In the second part, we will also learn how to prompt an AI system to generate valid HTML code, along with a code editor, to create a unique work of e-poetry. These practices are examples of cyborg writing because we integrate human and artificial intelligence to produce literal machines made of words. This workshop will offer participants a unique opportunity to learn basic code literacy and will offer tools and techniques that lower the technical bar to produce original works of digital literature. No experience in programming is needed to participate in this workshop.

Workshop Resources:

• I ♥ E-Poetry
• A Cyborg Digital Writing Primer