Rinse, Repeat : Paratextual Poetics of Literary Twitter Collage Retweeted

This essay studies what happens to the poetics of a text that was first written on or for a certain internet platform when it is later copy-pasted to a different literary medium – that of an edited and printed book. The main target of the discussion is Finnish author Karri Kokko’s conceptual literary work Retweeted (2016), a print-on-demand book, the roots of which are firmly in both the traditions of print media and the digital interfaces of the social media platform Twitter. The analysis pays close attention to the medial qualities of both Twitter and the conceptual novel that draws material from it. The essay aims to highlight the poetic qualities of the material produced and circulated on Twitter, the affectivity of the platform itself, and the effects the transposition into the codex format has on these phenomena. The essay argues that when investigating the poetics of internet-based collages, and social media platforms more generally, one must be mindful of 1) the logics of writing and revenue on internet platforms, and 2) the paratextuality of both the original online platforms and the book at hand.