Chapter 18: Connecting Infodemesnes by Poetic Osmosis

This chapter explores how modes of self-expression have the potential to transcend increasingly impenetrable boundaries and transmit knowledge across disciplines and cultures. First, the concept of infodemesnes is developed to describe the current knowledge landscape as one populated by closed-circuit information ecosystems that, by nature, inhibit communication with other such “imagined communities.” The latter half of the work performatively breaks down the binary between poetic and “objective” language, arguing that as a universal language, poetry can foster understanding across infodemesnes. It concludes with a clarion call for librarians and others in the Library and Information Science fields to legitimize and promote poetry as an effective carrier of knowledge.