The typewriter in the 21st Century: Understanding the nostalgic aesthetics and politics of Tyler Knott Gregson's Instapoetry

Abstract

From Twitterature to Instapoetry, several literary forms owe their genesis and propagation to social networking sites, or SNSs. Amongst these, Instapoetry has enjoyed the most notoriety, though at the cost of its demerits overshadowing its merits. One of Instapoetry's merits is its ability to induce a sense of nostalgia with the help of evocative aesthetic modalities deployed by a poet during an Instapoem's formulation. Some of these aesthetic modalities include the typewriter font, black and white images, sepia or Polaroid images, vintage stationary, calligraphy, and textured paper. Leaning on the concept of "nosthetics" or nostalgic aesthetics proposed by Tanja Grubnic, this paper decodes the temporal hypermediacy prominent in the works of American Instapoet and photographer Tyler Knott Gregson, particularly in his first poetry collection, chasers of the light: poems from the typewriter series. Published in 2014, the collection possesses a temporal aura which not only romanticizes the past but also conveys the present as a part of the past by impersonating pre-digital analog techniques and materials. Through Gregson's collection, this paper aims at understanding the various designs or ploys behind the habituation of nostalgic sensibilities and relics in modern digital creative expressions that have come to dominate the current field of cultural production. This paper reveals how Gregson's works resurrect, temporalize, nostalgize, restore, rehabilitate, remember, reflect, conserve, eternalize, memorialize, physicalize, sensualize, play, beguile, daydream, journey, mask, elevate, legitimize, and tout. The paper ends with a conclusion highlighting the importance of Instapoetry with regards to the preservation and continuation of historical literary practices, and with a suggestion encouraging further scholarly exploration on the topic.