This new movement in poetics involves all embodied activities that occur while waiting for someone's flash file, mov file, or other multimedia presentation to load. A truly democratic form, Tech Support Poetry can be experienced and performed by anyone who is under pressure to make malfunctioning technology work given a tight deadline. Inhabiting momentarily the space of delay between the act of pressing a button and the experience of having something happen that is supposed to happen, the Tech Support Poet inhabits a radically anticipatory position among contemporary writers.
Critical of liberal humanist assumptions about technology such as the demand that we should always get what we want as quickly and conveniently as we want it, Tech Support Poetry valorizes witholding over delivering, loading over executing, waiting over reaching one's destination, anticipating a performance over actually performing. Possible manifestations include increased heart rate as technology refuses to cooperate, pacing back and forth, profuse sweating, extreme devaluing of the self, and a general feeling of pointlessness and ennui. Tech Support Poetry has read John Cage's Silence and has run laps around its claims to awareness and meditative enlightenment through meaninglessness. Tech Support Poetry is Kafka meets Godot meets Office Space meets Junkspace meets Igor in Frankenstein's laboratory meets Harold Bloom's weak poet meets every pop singer who needs to use pitch correction software meets Lewis Hine meets Sasquatch.
The in-between time conjured by Tech Support Poetry denigrates author-functions and reader-functions alike, acknowledging in the meantime that our state is not unlike that of fleshy automatons moving other people's content around until such time as a more equitable relationship between technology-related labor and our collective awareness of bodies can be achieved. Tech Support Poetry produces no poems, no authors, no readers, and especially no criticism or manifestos. Join us in this exciting new poetics.
As an additional caveat, Tech Support Poetry gives double tagbacks times infinity in advance to note that anyone who is not not writing non-poems that are not Tech Support Poetry is completely irrelevant and should be poo-pooed by everyone not writing non-poems which fall under the category of Tech Support Poetry.
