it's the medium, stupid!

This is a cross-post from my American Poetry & Poetics class discussion group. I think/hope there's enough context within the content of the post for it to make some sense here (however hastily the post was written) . . .

Work has been insane lately, so I haven't had much time to post or respond -- though I am enjoying the discussions.

Wanted to briefly mention a thought that occurred to me last night when Rebecca said, re: Olson's Projective Verse, that "the typewriter only moves forward" (hope I got that right, Rebecca). Marshall Mcluhan's formula "the medium is the message" popped into my head -- so, I thought, it's true, even in poetry! Immediately this strikes me as too simplistic, but . . . just running with the thought for a second, it made me wonder about a possible relationship between contemporary poetics and our word processors -- which have a fundamentally different relationship to time and memory than a typewriter does (e.g., word processors move forward and backward, though they don't really move, not mechanically -- and they can archive, record multiple versions of the same thing).

Also, along these lines, I want to throw out a question/concern that's been in the back of my mind all semester. As if in unconscious fidelity to something like Mcluhan's formula, we tend to read nearly all poetry as "really about" poetics (or at least a relationship to poetry). It seems to me that this work most of the time, and provides a useful way into work that would be otherwise difficult to access. At the same time, I wonder how legitimate this tendancy is -- to what degree are we folding poetry itself (or the concept of poetry itself) along the metaphoric axis, taking the poetic endeavor itself as one gigantic extended metaphor for poetics? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.