What does the lyric mean now? An invention of Dante and Petrarch and Italian poets of the early Renaissance, lyric poetry captured troubadour song in written form—a refined vessel for emotion that became a model for civil subjecthood and the arrangement of public and private behavior in modern life.
As a poet, literary scholar, and editor of the Internet Poetry blog on Tumblr, Michael Hessel-Mial has concerned himself with the vestiges of the lyric in emerging literary practices that engage digital technologies. His poetry is expressive and confessional, but refracted across collages of images and words that he disperses across social media sites and apps, a lyric subject adequate to the position of the self in a network. Vita Nuova II connects his ephemeral output in a sustained, yet still kaleidoscopic, meditation on love and media.
Dante’s Vita Nuova was a part-prose, part-verse treatise on love, notable for being written in Italian rather than Latin, which was the literary language at the time. Hessel-Mial’s Vita Nuova II is also a genre-bending, multi-modal embrace of a fresh vernacular, combining his lyric voice—infused with the registers of texting and hip hop—with autobiographical confessional writing, essays on the nature of media and desire, paeans to “marxist anime teens,” selfies and snapchats, and search results that serves as proxies for the self. Expression, as Hessel-Mial reminds us, means squeezing out: the self is never revealed without the help of some kind of technological apparatus.
— Brian Droitcour
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