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Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.
“Campana clearly deploys his critical tools with precision and remains focused on his case studies. . . . This is all the more impressive considering the inherent difficulty of writing about multimedia works or ones that push against the boundaries of media altogether. Illustrations, such as the pages of the script for the tape recorder poem, are helpful and significantly contribute to the clarity of the analysis. . . . Expanding Verse is an excellent and thought-provoking work that deserves to be widely read.”
“Andrew Campana has made a major contribution to Japanese literary studies. In particular, he has lent a new vitality to the study of modern and contemporary Japanese poetry (shi), precisely by exploring the experimental borders of this very literary category, at the intersection of poetic writing and orality with other twentieth- and twenty-first-century media.”