ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a number of contemporary Bengali poems by both established and amateur poets, which have made an appearance on Facebook and WhatsApp, to think about how the use of poetry in social media helps change the production and consumption of literature, and how this transformation in turn encourages us to rethink the relationship between literature and dissent. Facebook and WhatsApp can be seen to represent a kind of remediation – not just of the poem as an object, but also a transformation of both poet and reader. The community of readers may be far apart, but they have been brought together through Facebook, through the ways in which Facebook has helped Srijato’s poem to reach his readers – nearness-no-matter-how-far. In the twenty-first century, Facebook and WhatsApp allow not just for a new kind of poetry about the future, but also for the possibility of a new kind of dissenting poetic community.
