“Poets and Machines / Poets as Machines: Charles Bernstein and Johanna Drucker”

Even if they have not turned into digital writers, Charles Bernstein and Johanna Drucker are paying special attention to poetry and/in the new technologies from the double perspective of poets and critics. They are redefining poetic practices and enunciation with the production of hybrid texts that cross the analog/digital divide and blur the boundaries between page and screen, poet and computer machine. The first part of this essay explores some texts by Bernstein that, either on the page or online, merge “old” and “new” textualities, interrogating the poetic medium and the language – or languages – of poetry. The second part, on the other hand, investigates Drucker’s attempt to write precisely “as” a machine, in the guise of a compression algorithm that condenses a larger text into an abstract, in a text produced in collaboration with visual artist Susan Bee (Fabulas Feminae, 2015). At stake is the inadequacy of the traditional model of representation, with its mimesis of voice and presence, as well as the emergence of a new consciousness that is evolving with the evolution of the new media.