A Hyperspace Poetics, or, Words in Space: Digital Poetry Through Ezra Pound's Vorticism

This essay examines the mathematical influences on Ezra Pound's Vorticism at the same time as it provides close readings, by way of interludes interwoven throughout, of digital texts whose underlying spatial structure appears to be both an analog for and a distinct departure from what Pound attempted to embody in his earlier "bookbound" texts. My intention is to lay out the groundwork for a conversation between bookbound and digital works, many of which I shall somewhat arbitrarily call "poems" (genre distinctions typically begin to break down in the digital realm), whose impetus appears to arise from the same dedication to translating scientific and mathematical principles of space into the poetic realm.