Distant Reading Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry

Distant Reading is a dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance. It argues that poetry is a cultural activity that is always situated within specific sites of performance--recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen--rather than a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words. "Middleton investigates the manifold events that are usually conglomerated together under the name of reading: interactions of voice and text, of phonology, physiology and psychology; the sociology of the poetry reading; the ways that contemporary technologies connect and disperse a poem's readership. These complexities are exactly what make poetry interesting. Distant Reading promises to be a groundbreaking study of contemporary poetry--and it's a pleasure to read."--Bob Perelman, author of The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History Peter Middleton is Professor of English at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, and author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Aftermath (poems).Middleton, Peter is the author of 'Distant Reading Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry', published 2005 under ISBN 9780817351519 and ISBN 0817351515.