This project has positioned emergent poetics as a response to the hierarchies of human perception and an alternative institutional critique by emphasizing the aspects of texts—their material forms—that resist, rather than conform to, conventional modes of interpretation. In the first chapter, guided by the photogram-poetics of Susan Howe, emergent poetics allows us to uncouple technical media from human interpretation. In essence, Howe’s poetry contravenes Marshall McLuhan’s famous characterization of media as “the extensions of man,” offering a broader view of the approach to written texts that shifts focus from those aspects immediately appealing to human perception toward the materiality of the texts that resists conventional interpretation. In the second chapter, Yedda Morrison’s deep erasure of Heart of Darkness serves to reconceptualize networks of mediation as zones of emergence. By invoking the long-neglected concept of “biospherical egalitarianism” from the Deep Ecology movement, I argue that a reading informed by emergent poetics amounts to a kind of “bewilderment,” or an experience of wilderness that belies the sovereignty of agential humanity over inanimate, passive nature. In the final chapter, I turned to the meta-theoretical concept of “ambience”—an environmental disruption of figure-ground, text-context binaries—in the poetry of Tan Lin to locate emergent poetics at the center of a theory of textuality for the twenty-first century, tracing the multiplicity of agencies at play in Lin’s work and the ambient networks they simulate and into which they dissolve.