Displaced metaphors: collaborative poetic responses to language in a post-physical world

This paper discusses an ongoing creative and conceptual collaboration between three authors, in which poetry has been approached as a way of exploring how lived experience and language are being transformed by the rapid evolution of virtual reality and its lexicon. We recognise, via Bakhtin, that language is always shared, in-use and redolent with multiple meanings. We acknowledge that we have written within a metaphorical space where we, as avatars of ourselves, use word processing software loaded with its own metaphors of page and print. The poems we have collaborated on have interrupted the increasing invisibility of metaphors such as ‘cloud’ and ‘screen’ as applied to technology, by working in the disjunction between metaphor and what it describes. We now reflect on the collaborative process and on the influence of technology on our practice, whilst maintaining a collaborative strategy. The paper explores the poetics of longing (Stewart) and Baudrillard’s simulacra and argues that concerns over remembering the real and the effects of nostalgia are offset by the generative potential of collaborative writing and its surprising forms of heteroglossia, which have exciting possibilities for creative practice.