THE POETICS OF CELEBSPLOITATION

Celebrity Culture and Social Media in Recent American Poetry

American poets in the era of social media are obsessed with celebrity – and especially with celebrity misfortune. I argue that the recent surge in poetry about celebrities poses important questions with regard to transmediation, high culture vs. mass culture, privacy, the mediatization of fame, and the nature of celebrity and microcelebrity. Poetry about celebrities tends to be highly conscious of how gender is represented in mass culture, and should be of interest to literary readers and new media theorists beyond the range of traditional poetry audiences. Poets under discussion include Andrew Durbin, Kate Durbin, Ben Fama, Lara Glenum, Kevin Killian, Tan Lin and Frank O'Hara.