Over the last several years, the intersection of poetry, data, and information theory has garnered more critical attention, with monographs such as Paul Stephens’ The Poetics of Information Overload, Nathaniel Wolfson’s Concrete Encoded, and Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data  developing distinct, but related, views on how poetry, information, communication, and data relate. In particular, recent global discourse about climate change, biotechnology and medical humanities, and the status of “humanism” all cast new light on the field of biopoetics. Often described as an offshoot of the field of bioart, biopoetry is commonly theorized as a site in which poets interrogate how “poetry—as information—might be hosted genetically or biologically,” by using “life itself as a medium.”(1) Indeed, when Eduardo Kac coined the term “biopoetry,” in his view, poetry had “moved away from the printed page,” living “in vivo” rather than in print media. Such in vivo poems used “biotechnology and living organisms... as a new realm of verbal creation."(2) In these contexts, reading is often discussed as a process of decoding the information stored in a poem.

Yet, more recently, Kac added two terms that complicate what it means to “read” biopoetry. Rather than representing only “verbal creation,” by 2022, Kac suggested that biopoetry represents “a new realm of verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal creation."(3) The addition of these terms makes sense, as Kac’s proposed experiments include a variety of creative modes, from dance, to smell, to sounds,(and beyond). Thus arises the question: what interpretive paradigms do paraverbal and nonverbal creation invite? And how might the triangulation of the “verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal” complicate informatics-based paradigms of reading that focus on coding and decoding as primary modes of interpretation and translation?

This panel invites contributors to explore what it means to read “in vivo” by developing their own ways of reading biopoetry beyond informatics paradigms. Contributors may use the following themes to guide their responses and are also invited to add their own:

• Non or paraverbal reading: looking, touching, feeling, sensing
• Reading the biopoetic illegible
• Reading & Reproduction: biopoetry, sexual politics, & remediation
• Transcription/Translation: biopoetry & multilingualism
• Lyric Reading: thinking with/ against anthropomorphism
• Genetic Reading: in-vivo reception, philology, & textual studies

(1) Avery Slater, “Life as New Media: Bioart, Biopoetry, and the Xenotext Experiment,” in A Companion to American Poetry, ed. Mary Mcaleer Balkun et al., Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture 104 (Wiley Blackwell, 2022), 332.
(2) Eduardo Kac, “Biopoetry,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3, no. 1 (2005), 13.
(3) Eduardo Kac, “Biopoetry” in Tomasula, Steve (ed.). Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2022), 512.