Constraint and the page, what experimental poets are doing with white space in 2026 - tips welcome

[Cobra]

I have been thinking about this since rereading some Susan Howe last month and then dipping into recent work from Don Mee Choi and Layli Long Soldier. There is a turn happening in how younger experimental poets are using the page as a compositional unit rather than a containment vessel. White space is doing semantic work, not just pacing work.

The Long Soldier piece WHEREAS is the textbook example, the document structure becoming the poem rather than the poem being placed inside a document structure. Don Mee Choi's translation work and her own work on the demilitarised zone uses similar moves with cartographic spacing. What I find interesting is how much of this is impossible to reproduce on a phone screen or in social media excerpts.

Which raises a craft question. If your formal moves are inseparable from the physical page, what happens to the poem when the page disappears, which is where most readers are encountering work for the first time. Are we writing for a medium that is being slowly hollowed out underneath us

[TheGame_Fan]

WHEREAS is the obvious touchstone here, that book actually had to argue with its own document type to mean what it meant

[MondayMoan51]

Don Mee Choi belongs in this conversation more than anyone else working right now honestly

[Protocol]

The phone screen point is the entire problem with contemporary experimental poetry distribution

[StoneCold]

I disagree, phone presentation has produced its own formal innovations, look at what people are doing on Instagram with stacked screens

[SilverSurfer]

Instagram poetry and experimental poetry are not the same conversation

[Jedi Stuart]

Why not, the constraints are real and the work that handles them is doing real formal work

[Outlaw]

Because experimental poetry is interested in disruption and Instagram is interested in legibility, those are opposed values

[Darren51]

Rae Armantrout has been doing this with shorter forms for decades and almost nobody talks about her in this context

[AnthonyCribb]

Anne Carson's Float was the version of this for the broader audience, the loose pages in a box was the whole argument

[DQ Eric]

What about poets working in epub native, anyone got recommendations

[Amber_44]

Yep, agree with that. Ha, fair enough

[Kieran88]

Amaranth Borsuk's work, if you have not read her, go and read her tonight