Poetry unbound : poems and new media from the magic lantern to Instagram Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first poetry has seemingly taken an increasingly insignificant role in our culture as radio film television and the internet have become dominant. Mike Chasar challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that poetry isnt dying dead or marginalized but rather that it has gone off the page where its cultural impact can be seen in the histories of the magic lantern radio film and television. Audiences havent vanished but the ways we experience and encounter poetry have changed. Mass and non print media havent stolen poetrys audiences but have opened up audiences to more types of poetry in more media formats. Moreover new media has not only changed the way people experience poems but poetry helps and continues to broker and secure the place of emergent media in American culture. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through to the emergence of the internet and karaoke Chasar examines the ways in which poetry was integrated with and employed by new media. He shows how the magic lantern went from a medium used primarily to frighten audiences to one that used poetry in schools and religious setting. He also considers how early cinema drew on poetry to legitimize itself as an art form and then how directors would turn to poetry in films to turn the act of solitary reading of poetry in a dramatic moment in which viewers experience the poem in a new context and how movies demonstrate their superior capabilities as a poetry reading machine. Chasars book allows us to understand the history of poetrys reception and its place in American culture and media that moves beyond the book and takes on new lives and meanings via emergent technologies Letters of fire Receiving Millay Overlook the poem but look the picture over Once more into the fray I need a phony poet tonight From Murder to milk and honey Afterword.