Jumping in to/ Playing games with electronic poetry

Electronic poetry, poetry itself is often hard to define, how do we handle the added elements of new-media poetry in which images, motion and reader interaction pair with the text. Conception, execution and consumption varies greatly between poetry on the page and hypermedia poetry and questions and problems of lexicon evaluation and comparison are frequent. But how can we look at a piece of electronic poetry and what do the multimedia nature of electronic poetry have to do with the meaning and purpose of a poem? Hopefully I’ll be doing an okay job with answering those sorts of questions by examining two electronic poems, “Mermaid” by Alis Yung and “Roulette” by Bebe Molina and Daniel C Howe.

“Mermaid” is not comprised of original text, rather it is a reinvisioning of part of a William Butler Yeats poem. The poem “A Man Young and Old” has 11 parts tracing youth, age, and the limitations, sorrows and joys of both. The third part, that Yung used for the text of “Mermaid” reads

“The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.”

When you open “Mermaid” the only words that are readable are “A mermaid found a swimming lad,”
and the rest of the page seems to only have small clouds of words. The type is too small to read even if the reader sticks their face right next to the screen (I tried that). The reader tries to click on on of the clouds, it starts growing and tremoring when the mouse is near and quickly shrinks back up. A spark of joy as the reader thinks they know what to do. But to their surprise and possibly sadness, the text balloons won’t stay inflated, they dance around, shrink back up, avoid your touch.

Yung seemed to be counting on the reader’s prior knowledge of the Yeats poem, or at least that they would get so frustrated they would google “A mermaid found a swimming lad” because of the difficulty reading the rest of the poem. But for it’s lack of easy readability, “The Mermaid” has the added elements of movement and reader interaction. The flopping of the text brings to mind the ocean, the movement of a fish’s tail, a struggle and desperation. The reader’s growing frustration with the text has them feeling much like the mermaid, desperate, frantic, joyful as they finally “catch” the text only to feel defeated once more as it quickly shrinks away. “Forgot in cruel happiness That even lover drown”. The electronic elements of “Mermaid” are few and simple but effective in that the reader actually interacts with the poem, not only that but the interaction and reaction are fitting to the poem’s theme. though one could just read the poem on the page, the multimedia version, though the same text, provides a new perspective to the text. While reading Yeats' words you see things more from the perspective of the swimming lad, you feel his surprise and his sorrow. But while interacting with Yeats' words through Yung's perspective you seem to become the mermaid. You pick one cloud of text for your own, you grapple with it, needing to see it and understand. Maybe at the end you are victorious and you are able to make out some of the words you've tried so frantically to make legible but while celebrating your victory the words shrink back up and you have to try again. To read the text only and multimedia poems is to experience two sides of the same short poem and in conjunction, they seem to lead to a deeper understanding of the text.

"Roulette" by Bebe Molina and Daniel C Howe is a different experience altogether. The poem has no text-only counterpart, nor could there be and this piece is more about the newness and untransferability of new media poetry than the idea of new takes on old ideas, as "Mermaid" did. When you open "Roulette" you find some sort of new-wave electronic dance music coming from your computer's speakers and three large, slowly spinning cubes with many smaller, semi-opaque cubes bouncing inside each. On the bottom is a randomly selected sentence, mine was; “Tuesday occupied his mouth, she said into it: the weight os a rose pulling down the word ‘rose’, somewhere again, headlights blinking when chance departs or wen she walks away from the table, does it hit red at the shot of her”.


Which makes little sense but sounds poetic. One I moved my mouse around for a bit, I discovered you could click on the cubes which I did. The middle cube became the word “Iris” and the sentence at the bottom changed.
I clicked again and again, each word in the cube seemed attatched to a poetic-sounding sentence fragment.
When put all together it seemed to make some sense, but at the same time the randomness plus the pre-constructed sentence fragments just made it seem like this was all trying too hard to be poetic. Though I think “Roulette” has the potential to be a nice commentary on the nature of language and the idea of poetry it would work much better without certain elements, like the music. The aesthetics could be better without cubes and high contrast, something softer maybe. The idea of “Roulette” I like very much, and there are almost endless opportunities for expansion and increasing complexity of the poem in the future. Since the structure of “Roulette” makes it impossible to imagine it as a text-only, it was important o make the electronic elements as perfect as they could be, I think that this good idea could have been made even better if the electronic elements did not appear so hard and rigid.

Multimedia, hypermedia, electronic, whatever you want to call this new form of literature it is clear that even within the group there are great possibilities for differences within this one ‘genre’. Though it’s clear from “The Mermaid” and “Roulette” not only the multiple ways electronic elements can interact with text, but also the benefits and problems of making additions to text. Though a new and relatively unstable art form, hypermedia poetry has the possibility of introducing new ways of thinking about words and new dimensions of literacy to readers through symbiociation of not only words, images and movement but concepts as well.

"The Mermaid" can be read here: "http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/summer2001/yeats/launch.html"
"Roulette" can be found at: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/08Spring/howe/index.html

Poetry and pixels and popups, oh my!

My initial response to electronic poetry based on the pieces assigned so far is excitement and fascination honestly. I signed up for this class because of interest in literature, the cultural impact of the electronic age, fulfillment of the ITS requirement and just plain curiosity’s sake. What does electronic literature mean? I knew about blogs, I knew what Zork is but I really had an exceedingly vague idea of electronic literature. And now that I have even the slightest idea I am hopeful for the reading part of “Reading/Writing Electronic Literature” and maybe a bit intimidated by the ‘writing’ aspect. It seemed to me that the main idea of the three assigned pieces is that bringing themes and methods of poetry to the digitalized realm can enhance the message and imagery of the poetry giving the reader a different experience and leaving the reader.
In “The Best Cigarette”, Billy Collins uses animation to create a stream of images while he narrates the poem. Starting with a typeset, foreshadowing the end of the poem. The images flow into one another, rising out of smoke, or the smoke rose in mirrored patterns that seemed oddly forboding as the poem discussed the contradictions of cigarettes, hinting at the allure of danger, and later on, the productivity that stems from habit.
“Puzzling Through Nine Lives” is not animated like the Collins poem but I’d venture that it’s even more effective. Pulling pieces about to revel the lines of the poems, the images on the tiles alter forming a patchwork. Forming a face. Forming a map. The multifacted, confusing and everchanging nature of identity is emphasized by the structure of the electronic elements of the poem as it becomes interactive, creating and shaping the idea of identity.
And unlike “The Best Cigarette” by Collins and “Nine: Puzzling through Several Lives” by Lewis, “A Man Young and Old: The Mermaid” was originally written by Yeats, before the digital age. It was adopted by Alis Yung into “The Mermaid”. I don’t know if it was just my computer but when I tried to read the poem, the stanzas wiggled and flopped about, I would not have known what the poem even said if I had not already read the text only poem. But the format and motion of the poem reminded me of the slippery, unsteady, impermenance of the sea, fish, love and life as the poem speaks of.
I’m looking forward to the course, the three introductory pieces we read display how poetry can be portrayed in the digital age, not just on a flat page but moving, but alive, interactive. It engages the reader on a whole new level, helping them gain a deeper understanding of the message of the poem.