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Trying to figure out what marks contemporary literature as contemporary is a deceptively complicated job because the concept of contemporaneity at stake is itself complicated Those complications are sustained by the unqualified way that the word contemporary seems to refer to both a quality of being with (con) in time (temp), in the colloquial sense of something being ‘of its time’, and to simultaneously identify our current moment as a historical period, a period that we’re historicising as we live it because one of the qualities that distinguishes it from previous periods is an obsession with now-ness[1] Within discussions of the arts, this doubling has been theorised at greatest length by those studying visual culture (usually vis-à-vis contemporary art, which John Douglas Millar has rightly pointed to as contemporary culture’s placeholder – its unelected parent category), not least because premonitions about post- and post-post-modern life put forward during the late-twentieth century were most popularly obsessed with the growing presence and influence of images[2] All such forethoughts focussed critical approaches to twenty-first century culture in terms of the visual: what can be seen (the visible) and ways of seeing it (visibility and our visualisations)   On the surface of contemporary life, the compression of multi-megapixel cameras into networked smartphones that feed data-streams like Instagram via one-click apps suggest those premonitions were well founded What excites me and some other poets who have been at the forefront of the Conceptual Writing scene is a simple observation that problematises such premonitions and the visual bias they ground In short, although the surface of life is constantly being flooded with images, its depths, structures, flows and our interactions with them have proved to be more dependent than ever on written language, not least because all computational data is a kind of emic, alphanumeric code The really new features of twenty-first century life are reforming life under the surface – in relational networks that we only have limp metaphors to describe, like ‘the cloud’ – and so we need to read everything and anything legible below the surface in ways that go beyond seeing