Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives – ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic – the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets s...

A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters.Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an ex...