This is the first issue of POETRY'S KIN, a journal produced by University of British Columbia education students. The goal of this journal is to showcase new poetries meant to be used by teachers and students for the purpose of studying poetry in the 21st Century. Can poetry help still help us to understand our new mediated communications and help us cope with life in the "media torrent", as Todd Gitlin calls it? This is a matter of great interest and urgency in the field of language and literacy education.
This publication is a project of poets who are teachers of poetry. It dispenses with old notions of authorship. It dispenses with notions of poetry as printed words of “poemy poets” on pristine pages. The poet is dispensable, fed to the machines, the IM of mediate attention. These are not holy icons, but new Yukons of the mind. The distant reaches of language submersed in codes beyond perception, invisible, like Adam Smith's economic hand thrust into the new economy of attention. Can poetry survive in this new virtual land? The poems collected here grasp and shake that hand using experimental poetics that seek no mastery, but instead plumb the semantic depths hoping to discover the po/e/tential of this new information environment—to create a settlement in this strange infosphere through virtual, visual, sonic and textual inquiry: Can poetry thrive in this new environment of automatons and digital fizz? Can poetic revelations be found on the screen? Can we come closer in kinship using the tools of solipsistic discourse?
There is only one way to find out.