A very online subjectivity: Poetry, embodiment and digital spaces

In 1991, Marjorie Perloff wrote, in her book Radical Artifice , that modern media challenges poetics to engage a ‘dialectic between the simulacrum and other, dialectic no longer image real … but word image’ (1991, p. 92). She further acknowledged how digital technology had altered relationship reader text through new formats possibilities of interaction, also asked ‘(W)hat about its effect on our human interactions?’ (Perloff, 188). This article focuses three contemporary Australian poetry publications, varying format presentation – Shastra Deo’s ‘Self-Portrait as Goro Majima’ (2019); Devotionals by Marcus Whale (2018); Holly Isemonger’s chapbook Deluxe Paperweight (2016) all which navigate concepts anonymity, authenticity, (un)returned gaze, experience physical alienation spaces. Through close reading analysis these works, drawing interviews (conducted author this article) with respective poets, considers constructing self subjectivity age