Glitch Poetics in Japan

This talk will explore how poets in Japan have engaged with the “digital” over the last several decades: not only using new media technologies to create new kinds of poetry and poetic language, but to use poetry to rewrite how we conceive of, use, and are enmeshed in digitality. More specifically, I will show how poets—both in print and on screen—have used the language and imagery of digital media breakdown in their work. I argue that these are emblematic of a broader tendency not just of poets using their work as a site of critique of digital mediation, but of them positioning poetry itself as a glitch that actively disrupts literary, technological, media, and societal systems.

Andrew Campana is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Media at Cornell University. His first book, Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media, was published by the University of California Press in 2024.

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Host or Publisher Center for East Asian Studies