Guest lecture – Prof. Dr. Peter Stein Larsen: "From Book Poetry to Digital Poetry"

The DFG Centre for Advanced Studies “Russian-Language Poetry in Transition” (FOR 2603) cordially invites you to a live lecture by Prof. Dr. Peter Stein Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark), entitled “From Book Poetry to Digital Poetry”. The lecture will be held in English and will be streamed live via Zoom. Please register by e-mail with our coordinator Katja Baharova (baharova@uni-trier.de) no later than July 14, 2020, to receive the access data.

About the lecture:

In my lecture, I will discuss the relationship between “book poetry” and “digital poetry.” I examine
the differences, as well as the similarities, between poetry as presented in these two media.
Research on the transition from book poetry to digital poetry has mainly focussed on the significant
changes in genre and work concepts as well as in the author and reader roles. However, several
trends within the tradition of poetry have intensified and have further developed since the
emergence of the digital media. The focus in this lecture will thus be on four key features, which
were founded in book poetry as far back as early Modernism and the avant-garde movements, but,
to a great extent, those features have unfolded in digital poetry. The four features are multimodality,
the montage form, the network structure, and the serial form. The artistic opportunities offered by
digital poetry are not only due to technological opportunities in the new media. Such opportunities
are just as much due to the innovations in multimodality, montages, network structures, and
seriality realized by poets like Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Eliot, and Pound in early
Modernism. My lecture concludes with an example of how the four features form the basis for a
work of digital poetry, namely Johannes Heldén’s The Primary Directive (2008).

About Prof. Dr. Peter Stein Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark):

Peter Stein Larsen is a professor in Scandinavian Literature at Aalborg University, Denmark. He
has been leader of the research project “Contemporary Poetry between Genres, Art Forms, and
Media” (2013-2016) and of the Centre for Research in Contemporary Poetry (2014-). He has
written several books on Scandinavian and international poetry. His latest monograph Lyriske linjer
(2018) deals with five trends in contemporary poetry: ecopoetry, migration poetry, apocalyptic
poetry, conceptual poetry, and long poems.