Montana Book Festival 2017

From November 2013 to June 2014, Librarian and poet Devin Becker interviewed 11 prominent poets across the country on their writing practices with a particular focus on how their practice changed with the dawn of the personal computer in the 1980s and 1990s. The interviews ranged widely across subjects, eras, and technologies, covering such topics as the iPad usage of Louise Glück and Rae Armantrout, Bruce Beasley’s use of Google Translate to rewrite adolescent poetry, K. Silem Mohammad’s flarf practices, Stephanie Strickland’s online mashup of Melville and Dickinson, and Robert Pinsky’s authoring of an early 80s text-based computer game. 
There were a few overarching questions, however, that guided the interviews: How did the introduction and subsequent spread of digital environments impact the way these writers produced their work? What types of changes did they experience during the transition from paper-based working environments to digitally based ones? Did they see these new environments as mere extensions of their paper-based ones? Or did they experience the change as a fundamental break in their practices? Becker attempted to cover these and a series of other in each interview with a view towards presenting the answers together