AustLit

'Charles Whalley’s essay on post-internet poetics ‘This has been a blue / green message exiting the social world’ takes its title from a Sam Riviere poem, which makes me imagine ‘blue / green’ text messages bubbling like algae blooms on a mobile phone. If communication and sociality are nothing new to contemporary poetics – a conversational style pervaded many of the poems by Australian poets who have been writing since the 1970s that I cut my teeth on, poets such as Ken Bolton, John Forbes and Pam Brown, themselves influenced by the earlier ‘personism’ of American poets such as Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan – it remains in 2016 where so many of our conversations happen online (whether directly messaged or indirectly posted). Digital media has become an intrinsic intercessor not just in the expanded ‘digital literary sphere’ (Simone Murray 2015), but also aesthetically.' (Introduction)