Out of all the choices that I had this year for classes that would fulfill one of my Tier 2 requirements, this was my first choice. I’ve always enjoyed English classes since I can remember. It seems there was a division in my family as to who was good at what. I was always better at English classes and my brother was always better at Math ones. But in the first class of this semester, I quickly learned that this course was not what I thought it was going to be. It was going to be a challenge because electronic literature was something I had never even knew of.
Throughout this class, I’ve realized a couple things about electronic literature and digital poetry. One is that the text of the poem or literature is reliant on the illustration, movement, symbols and overall interaction with the reader. This is described as “symbiociation” by Deena Larsen in her article “A Quick Buzz Around the Universe of Electronic Poetry”. What she means from the term sybiociation stems from the scientific term symbiosis, which is a mutually beneficial relationship between two animals that do and provide things for one another. What that means in terms of e-poetry is that the text and “sensory information” are like the animals and work together to create something with a deeper meaning. Without the other, the result wouldn’t be as great and as significant. Another thing I’ve learned about e-poetry is that it is hard to define. I really enjoyed Memmott’s reasoning in his article “Beyong Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading”. He reasoned that e-poetry is like an instrument. I agree with this because in order to make the beautiful sound that an instrument is capable of, an educated musician must interact with it; the same goes for e-poetry. And educated user must react with it because if they don’t find all the little hidden surprises that lie within some digital poetry, they won’t get the full aspect of it. Memmott says, “The potential of digital poetry resides in its computational aspects: its conditions of interaction, playability, and environment. It is an operational interface for a system of signifying harmonics (294).” In other words, the greatness of e-poetry lies in what kind of interaction it asks of its user.
In discussing actual e-poems and my own attempts to write it, I’ve found that I enjoy the poems that open up more to you as you go on with the poem. One of the poems from our syllabus that I chose to discuss is “Firefly” by Deena Larsen. The poem starts with a lot of greenery in the background and a very “nature-y” scene. It then tells us that it’s “a tale told in 180 degrees of separation.” In order to start the poem, the user must click on the word “firefly” in the bottom right hand corner. This is where the idea of an educated user becomes necessary. If the user doesn’t know or use their skills of investigation to figure that out, they’re going to have no idea how to interact with the poem in order to get to the next stanza. When first reading this poem, I went with the logical route of clicking the arrow in the bottom right hand corner to get to the next stanza, therefore reading it in a more traditional stanza-by-stanza form. I didn’t find out until we discussed in class that by clicking each line of the poem would turn up the corresponding line in the next stanza, therefore eliminating the arrow at the bottom. This may be a more interesting way of reading the poem but I couldn’t help but realize that the user misses something but doing so. Without clicking on the arrow, the background scenery doesn’t change and I think that adds something to the poem. The changing elements add meaning to what the author is trying to get across. In this way, I’m not sure this was a good choice by Larsen, unless all of her readers are investigative enough to find what other ways the poem could be read.
In terms of what these elements add to the poem, the pictures are a giant piece of it. As one reads on, the picture in the back changes and the reader realizes its not just green scenery but someone’s memorial. This adds to the poem as the reader realizes that the author is not just talking about a firefly but about loss. As the firefly crawls on her finger as if it’s “home”, she and the firefly have a connection that is deeper than most people have with insects and then as he flies away, she feels a sense of separation. It’s important to read it also by clicking each line because it gives another feeling to the poem that one doesn’t get by reading it by stanza. When read line by line, it creates a feeling of fleetingness and mystery or elusiveness. When this way of reading it and feeling is put together with the pictures, the reader may take away that the author lost someone important, as happens to almost everyone at some point in their lives. The meaning I took away from this poem is that the people we love in our lives will not always be here.
The other poem I am choosing to discuss is “Dear E.E.” written by Lori Janis and designed by Ingrid Ankerson. It starts as a square that houses the movement and text. The title of the poem then starts to move slowly back and forth. As time goes on, the poem reveals more. The first line sounds kind of nonsensical, but the reader soon realizes that it’s because the narrator is in a dream and dreams tend to be that way. The narrator says that she dreamt that someone came into their apartment, even though they didn’t have one, to rearrange it. The narrator says that she had no recollection of what the apartment looked like before this person was there. Everything up until this part in the poem moves on its own and requires little to no interaction from the user. The next part requires the user to use their mouse to move over different images and objects to show the next part of the poem. The poem then says more nonsensical things, like how the refrigerator is in front of the window blocking the sunlight and the sink is by the door. The narrator sounds confused as to why this person who came into the apartment moved things around like they did and doesn’t understand it. There is also fast-paced, but at the same time ethereal music that accompanies this. Then, in the upper right-hand corner, there is a button that says wake-up. When clicked on, the reader seeing a little autobiography about the writers. Lori Janis’s is extravagant, saying that she lives with many animals and wants to be strange things like a jedi, monk and political activist. Ingrid Ankerson’s is far simpler and says that she only wishes to find a matching pair of socks. What I take away from this is satire. Janis is going above and beyond reality and Ankerson is far simpler, just wishing to find some socks. What I take away from the poem is that someone’s world feels upside down because someone else has entered it, maybe a significant other. They feel like their furniture has been placed in odd places and perhaps more symbolically, they feel their life has been led into a strange direction and now that person is gone, they realize how weird it makes them feel. I feel all the elements that are added to the poem, like the weird, almost seizure-like, movements of the words and images of the poem add to the surrealness of the poem. The poem aims to make things seem odd and off and the effects are and enhance that feeling. It also influences the reader’s adeptness for discovery. You have to move the mouse around to see what else the poem involves, and that is what gets a reader hooked and interested in any poem or work of literature. The way the poem is constructed almost makes it feel like a dream and that helps the reader understand that the narrator feels out of sorts, which is something many people can relate to, especially after a break-up.
After reading and interacting with all these forms of electronic literature, I was curious as to how they accomplished this and what it was like. When I started playing around with Powerpoint to create my own electronic poetry, I quickly learned that it is not as easy as it looks. I spent some painstaking hours….just to get one sentence how I wanted it. After watching it back, I realize that my work isn’t even half as good as those we have read. Although I don’t blame myself because I’m new at this kind of thing, I know have a heightened respect for those that do this.
Doing this opened up a world of possibilities. I chose to animate some lyrics to one of my favorite songs because I thought it would be easier to start out with that to practice and then try it on one of my own poems. I saw that I was able to give all new meaning to a word or sentence just by changing the color or the way it moved. For example, I was able to make the sentence, “Mosquito, mosquito, buzzing around” look as if it were flying around by using the effect where I create the path of the animation.
What frustrated me was that I had a hard time thinking of ways to make it convey what I wanted to convey. The ability to put word and sensory images together and have them fit in a way that is beneficial to what you want the work to say is hard. I was constantly second guessing what I was doing because I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was conveying it the way I wanted it to.
(I had a hard time with this part because I had the words come in different directions and then wiggle around. This was a tedious part of the process.)
I would say that if I were to write a poem that I intended to be turned into digital poetry, I don’t know if I would write the poem as I went. I think I would first write the poem with pen and paper first but to spur that creativity, I would keep in the back of my mind how I intend to later present it to a reader. The process of animating a poem is frustrating because it can be very tedious and if you’re writing it while you’re animating it, your frustration can get in the way of creating a good poem.
In general, I’m glad I took this course. It’s exposed me to something I never even knew was out there. I hope that it will spur my own creativity to create poems, even if it’s just for my own enjoyment.
