Electronic poetry is something I have never encountered before I took this Electronic Literature class. I am happy to have had the opportunity to experience this kind of poetry for this very reason. It is something new to me and it is a different way for me to look at poetry. Of course I have read poems off of pages but it is nothing compared to e-poetry. It does not give you visual effects to help you better understand a poem or to really enjoy reading it and analyzing it. In Currents in Electronic Literacy, it explains what electronic poetry is, and how electronic poetry appeals to you through sounds and visuals. In this article it is explained how e-poetry appeals to people. “The most wonderful thing about e-poetry is that there are so many possible worlds to explore. Each work is unique; each forms a pathway to think and communicate beyond words on a page. The computer offers ways of symbiociating images, sound, and motion that paper cannot. Poets are even experimenting with new ways of creating poetic structures and navigating the poem so the same words may take on very different associations (and symbiociations) depending on the path the reader takes.” (1) E-poems will do many things to get your attention. The words will appear and disappear, images will be used and they will move around or appear and disappear, words will move around and sounds will be made and many other affects will be seen as well.
For example, in one of the first e-poems I read, called Faith by Robert Kendall, (2) It starts by you clicking “begin”. Then the word “Faith” appears at the top of the screen in script writing with the “F” resembling the first letter in an old fairytale. Then the words “logic can’t bend this” fall into places and you then must click the next arrow at the bottom. Next, more words of different colors appear, and after clicking the arrow another time, the same thing happens again. The next time you click the arrow the rest of the poem appears. Then some words move around and enough time is given for you to finish reading the poem. The arrow at the bottom appears yet again and the last time you click it, the words fall to the bottom of the page, but left to be read is “just to sum up faith.” The way this poem is set up is that the words in the poem explain faith and appear and disappear to explain faith in different ways. This poem shows that nothing can be better than or beat faith, and not even logic can do this.
For example, in one of the first e-poems I read, called Faith by Robert Kendall, (2) It starts by you clicking “begin”. Then the word “Faith” appears at the top of the screen in script writing with the “F” resembling the first letter in an old fairytale. Then the words “logic can’t bend this” fall into places and you then must click the next arrow at the bottom. Next, more words of different colors appear, and after clicking the arrow another time, the same thing happens again. The next time you click the arrow the rest of the poem appears. Then some words move around and enough time is given for you to finish reading the poem. The arrow at the bottom appears yet again and the last time you click it, the words fall to the bottom of the page, but left to be read is “just to sum up faith.” The way this poem is set up is that the words in the poem explain faith and appear and disappear to explain faith in different ways. This poem shows that nothing can be better than or beat faith, and not even logic can do this.
That was just one example of how e-poems can work. In this class I have experienced many e-poems. Another one that I particularly liked was A Study in Shades also by Robert Kendall. (3) This poem has two sides of text. One side of the text is under a black and white picture of a male head, and the other under a black and white picture of a woman’s head. There are next arrows beneath both of them and when you click them a new part of the poem appears, but that is not all that happens. When you go through the poem under the male’s head the head of the woman starts to fade until it disappears. When you go through the woman’s poem, the face of the man begins to darken until it is black. At first I did not understand this, but then I realized that this woman was the man’s daughter and he had Alzheimer’s. As he falls deeper into his disease she becomes unrecognizable to him and he becomes nothing but a black hole to her. It is a very sad poem that has a very deep meaning.
A third poem I found very interesting was Fidget by Kenneth Goldsmith. (4) The poem contains words that are moving around the screen connected by lines and when you move your mouse over the words they change color. You can click a word or the screen and it will change and new words will appear and disappear and move in different directions. I had no idea of this poem for a while but after looking and analyzing I realized that these words were every action of Kenneth Goldsmith that he had done that day. All of these words that were moving around and “fidgeting” were what he had done in that entire day.
A poem we did not read in class that I came across on the Internet was Dispossession by Robert Kendall. (5) It opens up with moving clouds on the left side and a picture of a city in the top left corner and a picture in the bottom right corner that looks like trees, but the pictures aren’t very clear. There are individual words placed on and between the two pictures that you can click on. Once you click on a word it will say a phrase and there are words below and above the phrase that you can also click on. These words will lead you to another phrase and so on and so forth. This poem is about a Caribbean man who is moving from his homeland to America. The picture of the trees represents his homeland, and the picture of the city represents America. The changeable structure of the poem represents his unknown future.
In our Electronic Literature class we are required to do our own poem in Microsoft PowerPoint. In my creative experiences so far I have learned that there are many different and interchangeable possibilities in e-poetry. You can dictate the backgrounds that you use, the pictures you use, as well as the fonts and font colors you use. You can make the pictures and words enter and exit the screen in exciting ways. If your poem is following a certain theme then you can make the effects match that theme. In my personal experiences I have played with the entrances of the words. I have made my words fade in and out of my page as well as use other great ways to make your words appear. My background right now is a picture that I actually took. It is a picture of a quiet nature scene and I believe my poem is quiet and mysterious so I decided to use that picture. I am much more inspired by writing poems in this way because it is so much different and it is nice to do something that is different. Also it is a much more creative and fun way to write so I am inspired to write poetry in this way. The only thing about this creative process that frustrated me was that there are so many things you can do with the poem, almost too many and I am not familiar with all of these visual effects. I wish I knew how to work everything in Microsoft PowerPoint because then I could fully take advantage of these effects and make my poem as creative as can be. All in all, this technology opens up many opportunities for poetry, and I am happy that I get the opportunity to use it myself.
I believe e-poetry is one of the best things that has ever happened to poetry. Poetry has always been plainly written on paper but now, it has transformed into something people have never seen before. It lets you see the poem in a new way, and with the effects and sounds and how they are portrayed, it helps you to better understand the deeper meaning of the poem. Some even let you manipulate the poem by clicking different things or actually playing a game when using the e-poetry. If you look at a poem on a piece of paper and then look at it as e-poetry, you may see a different meaning of the poem as a whole. E-poetry makes poems much more interesting and even fun to read and I definitely think that it is an improvement in how poems are written. Not one e-poem is like another. “The differences between page and screen are only a beginning, however. Because of the diversity of technologies available for the development of digital poetry, the variety of their use as a signifying strategies, and radical differences between individual practitioners, digital poetry is not a single recognizable entity.” (6) So all e-poems are different in many different ways, and they are allowed to be. That, I believe, is what makes them so great. There is always a surprise and it is always interesting. Coincidentally Robert Kendall is the author of almost all the poems I chose to use in this blog. I enjoy his work because it is truly unique and none of his poems are alike in the least. You would not be able to tell who the author was of these poems just by reading them because the content of them is that different.
Citations
1. Currents in Electronic Literacy Fall 2001 (3), <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/larsen/quickbuzz.html>.
6. Memmot, Talon. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge, Mass, 294.
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