It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways.

Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.

"In this timely and engaging study, Chasar examines the largely untold story of poetry as it has appeared in various forms of emerging media over the last century and a half . . .This well-written book will have a broad audience." - Choice

"For those stuck in the dichotomy of print and screen, or the dichotomy of analog and digital, this book is for you. It is an argument that looks beyond these dichotomies, into what binds and frees, of what something is (unbound) when it is not limited to one type of inscription." - Instasociety

"Chasar’s argument powerfully renovates how we imagine 'a literary form available to all.'" - Genre

"While poetry studies has in recent years increasingly considered the ways in which print . . . mediates the transmission of poetry, Chasar extends and complicates this exploration through his emphasis on non-print media and in doing so necessarily enlarges what should count as poetry and what strategies we might use to study it." - Journal of Modern Periodical Studies