What circulates no longer belongs to me, yet still carries my presence.
🟦 Read this article in French:
Poésie numérique et pratique post-digitale : vers une lecture humaniste des formes contemporaines
Introduction
Poetry has never stopped evolving alongside the mediums that carry it.
From manuscript to print, from page to book, from voice to recording, each technical transformation has reshaped its forms, rhythms, and modes of dissemination.
Today, poetry circulates within a profoundly transformed environment: the digital network, and more concretely, the web.
It unfolds through brief, visual, and fragmented forms, often designed to appear on screens, to be read quickly, shared, repeated, forgotten, and rediscovered.
In this context, it becomes possible to speak of contemporary digital poetry, not as a marginal genre, but as a widespread practice — even if it is rarely named as such.
These forms remain largely unnamed and insufficiently structured in discourse.
This article proposes to outline a reading of these practices by considering them as manifestations of a post-digital practice: a form of creation that is no longer defined by the digital itself, but by its natural inscription within the network.
A Widespread Practice, Yet Rarely Named
Thousands, even hundreds of thousands of artists today publish poetic forms on the web:
• short poems
• micro-poetry
• text-on-image works
• visual fragments
• contemporary haiku
• hybrid writings combining text and image
These forms are sometimes associated with specific practices such as instapoetry, often linked to Instagram.
However, this reality is now broader: digital poetry circulates across a multitude of platforms, personal websites, blogs, and diverse publishing spaces.
It is not confined to a single medium or platform, but rather unfolds within a network of circulations where poetic forms appear, transform, and move.
These works circulate across digital spaces. They are seen, shared, archived, sometimes forgotten — yet they all participate in the same phenomenon: a diffuse poetic presence within the network.
Despite this widespread presence, these practices are still rarely theorized as a coherent whole.
They are often perceived as marginal, informal, or tied to specific uses, rather than recognized as a contemporary form of poetic creation.
Despite their massive presence, these practices remain insufficiently identified as a global phenomenon of poetry in circulation on the web.
In this context, I do not claim to invent these forms, but rather to propose a reading of them, grounded in my own practice of Humanist Digital Art:
a way of articulating a practice that already exists, but remains only partially structured in discourse.
From Digital Poetry to Post-Digital Practice
The term “digital poetry” may suggest a rupture: poetry produced by or for digital technologies.
Yet in the current context, this distinction is becoming less and less relevant.
Digital poetry is often approached through its technological dimensions — code, interactivity, algorithmic generation — but these perspectives do not fully account for more discreet, brief, and widely circulated forms.
The digital is no longer a new or exceptional space.
It has become the everyday environment of creation, dissemination, and reception.
To speak of a post-digital practice is to recognize that:
• the digital is no longer the subject
• it is an environment
• a natural space of circulation
In this perspective, contemporary digital poetry is not defined solely by its tools, but by the way it exists within the network:
• it is designed for the screen
• it circulates within flows
• it is encountered in fragments
• it coexists with other forms (images, videos, texts)
Thus, post-digital poetry is less a category than a condition:
that of a practice embedded in an environment where the digital is omnipresent, yet no longer central.
Contemporary Forms of Digital Poetry
Several forms emerge within this contemporary practice. They are not exclusive, but constitute recurring tendencies.
Image-Poems
Text and image are no longer separate.
They form a visual-poetic unit, where meaning emerges from their relationship.
The poem is not a caption.
The image is not an illustration.
They coexist as a single form.
Micro-Poetry and Brevity
Brevity becomes central:
• a few lines
• a few words
• sometimes a single sentence
This brevity produces a flash of intensity:
a rapid mental image, an immediate sensation.
Contemporary Haiku
Inspired or not by Japanese tradition, contemporary haiku:
• capture a moment
• express perception
• favor simplicity and precision
They find in the network an ideal space for circulation.
Visual Digital Writing
Text becomes visual material:
• typography
• layout
• integration into the image
Writing no longer simply says — it shows.
Poetry in Circulation
These forms share a fundamental characteristic:
they are designed to circulate.
They appear in flows, disappear, and reappear elsewhere.
Their existence is inseparable from movement.
Poetic Form and Algorithmic Environment
The brevity, clarity, and visual strength of these forms are not only aesthetic choices.
They are also adapted to their environment.
Within the network, works:
• are seen quickly
• must capture attention
• must be immediately readable
Search engines, feeds, and AI systems participate in this circulation.
They do not create the works.
But they organize visibility, encounter, and sometimes disappearance.
In this context, certain poetic forms become particularly suited:
• short
• visual
• memorable
They can be quickly understood, retained, and sometimes relayed.
A Historical Continuity
These contemporary forms do not emerge from nothing.
They extend existing traditions:
• haiku and its brevity
• haiga (image–text compositions combining haiku and image)
• imagism and the precision of the image
• modern poetry and its formal ruptures
The digital does not create brevity.
It amplifies its reach.
It does not create the mental image.
It accelerates its circulation.
Thus, contemporary digital poetry belongs to a continuity, while transforming the conditions of its dissemination.
An Artistic Experimentation Within the Network
In this context, publishing becomes an act of creation in itself.
To create a work is also to:
• put it online
• let it circulate
• accept that it partially escapes its author
The network becomes a space of experimentation:
• works live there
• they are interpreted
• they encounter unknown audiences
The artist no longer fully controls the trajectory of the work.
They accompany its movement.
In My Own Practice
For several years, I have been developing forms of visual poetry and image-poems on the web, within this dynamic of creation and circulation.
These works take the form of short texts, often associated with images, where brevity, linguistic tension, and the relationship between word and image play a central role.
They are published across several series, including:
• Poetry & Images
• Visual Poetry & Digital Writing
• Social and Political Micro-Poetry
• The Carrier Pigeons — Haiku-Image Series
These series are part of a broader set of contemporary practices, where poetry unfolds in the network through brief, visual, and fragmentary forms.
My poetic works are written in French, while my reflective texts — such as this one — are also available in English.
What I publish does not remain fixed:
these forms enter flows of circulation, are seen, reused, and interpreted in various contexts.
They thus participate in a form of ongoing algorithmic performance, where the presence of the work extends beyond its moment of creation.
They contribute, in their own way, to this poetry in circulation, characteristic of post-digital practice.
A Humanist Reading of These Practices
Within the framework of Humanist Digital Art, these forms are not merely aesthetic objects.
They are human presences within the network.
Each poem, each fragment, each image:
• carries an experience
• an emotion
• a memory
Technology becomes a medium serving this presence.
The digital is not the subject:
the human is.
Conclusion
Contemporary digital poetry is not an exception.
It is already a widespread practice embedded in the uses of the network.
When considered as a post-digital practice, it becomes possible to think differently about it:
• not as a novelty
• but as a transformation of the conditions of creation and dissemination
In this perspective, it becomes possible to read these forms differently:
as a poetry that circulates, transforms, and continues to carry, despite everything, a human presence.
There is a part of humanity in every fragment of writing.
See also
These pages provide further insight into the concepts discussed in this article and explore concrete forms of digital poetry.
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
🟦 How the Concept of Humanist Digital Art Was Born
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — A Global, Poetic and Digital Artistic Practice
🟦 Poésie visuelle & écritures numériques
🟦 Poésie & images — Série de poèmes-images et écritures numériques
🟦 Les pigeons voyageurs — Série de haïkus-images
🟦 Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor