As a movement, though – if it is possible to call Alt Lit a movement (I would say it may come to be seen as a movement for its uniqueness in making the digital world not just its medium but its subject, and letting the two iterate off each other) – Alt Lit is full of richness and energy.
While other Web-based poetry movements exploit appropriated text — cutting and pasting or scooping vast amounts of preëxisting data — Alt Lit tends to use emo-heavy, homespun language, bearing the urgency and candor of a status update; no sentiment is too trite to be repurposed as poetry.
I hope so, because Alt Lit poetry has the potential to deliver a shot to whichever arm performance poetry hasn't got to first.
Head to the truly wonderful repository of experimental and Alt Lit The Newer York and you'll be hard pressed to find a.mobi or an epub file.
Tao Lin keeps himself somewhat aloof from the larger Alt Lit community, swooping down occasionally to cast just enough largesse to keep his acolytes happy, offering some the imprimatur of Tao's Muumuu House.
From early hypertext experiments to newer forms such as Flarf and Alt Lit, writers have been scraping digital language and cobbling together challenging works of digitally sourced literature for the better part of four decades.
For Nicholas Lezard, Tao Lin's second (or third) novel, Richard Yates, finds him developing an interest in something "old-fashioned... a concern for people, for the truth, a wish that lives could be lived better", an interest which testifies to influences from beyond the confines of Alt Lit.
At its best, the poetry of Alt Lit mixes three elements whose spread to mainstream literature would add extra richness.
It is the willingness to borrow, copy, cut, paste, click and remix that may prove to be the most incendiary point of contact between Alt Lit and mainstream publishing.
