Poetry in the Age of Networks
Mikhail Gronas, Artjoms Šeļa · 2026
Abstract This chapter is an overview of the relationships between contemporary Russian poetry and various types of networks. In recent decades, the internet (the network of computers) and social networks have become the primary medium for creating, reading, and evaluating poetry. The arrival of online poetic communities shortened the distance between the poets and their audiences and led to the fragmentation of poetic tastes and the emergence of online “poetic stardom.” In addition to these explicit networks, the chapter focuses on implicit (or latent) poetic networks that can only be derived using computational methods. An example of such a network is a map of contemporary poetic tastes constructed using the expert voting data for an influential literary prize, Moskovskii schet. Finally, the chapter proposes a method for mapping the network of intrinsic features of poetics texts by computationally representing poems in two broad dimensions: formal regularity and lexical complexity.