Can Digital Literature Be Poetry?
What Electronic Poetry Means and Its Place in Modern Literature
We've come a long way from the days when a "real poet" wrote only long-hand, perhaps transcribing a precious finished piece by typewriter.
In the article, Introduction to Visual Poetry, digital or electronic poetry is described as part of an evolution of visual poetry, where the impact of the poem depends in part on how it looks. This article provides more complete information on the range of digital poetry, and tries to answer the question “what makes this poetry”?
Range of Digital Poetry
Cynthia Hogue and Elizabeth A. Frost in their poetry and interview anthology Innovative Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2006) describe digital poetry and visual poetics as the source of “some of the most exciting” new poetry.
The growth of electronic journals has provided even traditional poets with the opportunity to publish on-line. However, while digital poetry can include any work created or disseminated with the assistance of computers, the field has pushed the boundaries in all directions, testing crossovers with sound, video technology, and animation.
An example of a semi-traditional approach is Robert Sullivan’s USA/Canada by Amtrak, published originally in the on-line publication Trout and picked up by the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (NZEPC). In this poem hypertext is used to link to footnotes and related small poems.
Bill Manhire’s Asterisk Machine (Mark 3), also on the NZEPC site, was originally commissioned as a type of sculpture for the Now See Hear exhibition at the Wellington City Art Gallery in 1990. The work was transformed into a static print version, then into a kinetic poem, with shifting rows of Xs (and the very occasional asterisk) having a strangely powerful impact.
Interactivity can sometimes be an important feature of digital poetry, with sampling and collaborative writing encouraged.
How Poetic is Electronic Poetry?
In his article Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg observes that “the literary mainstream largely regards electronic literature with either apathy or animosity.” In addition to its independence from the publishing and bookselling world, the feature that may be most offensive to the official literary world is the changeability of digital literature. The fact that a poem may appear in several multi-media versions and never really be finished can be difficult to accept when judging and ranking finished products is so much part of the mainstream. And yet never being satisfied with a poem, even after publication in a hard-copy version, is part of the experience of many artists.
Rettberg observes that in judging electronic literature, in addition to looking at how well the works use their media, they need to be examined “in the context of the art and literary movements from which they emerge and with which they are in conversation.”
This suggests that one should apply to digital poetry the same tests as to more traditional forms. How well does the poem use language, for meaning, for music, for visual impact?
At how many levels does the poem convey meaning? How is it crafted? If these questions are answerable, and the answers are generally positive, there would appear to be no reason why a digital work should be dismissed as not poetry.
A companion to this article, “How Dada is Digital Poetry?” explores this theme in a bit more depth in considering links academics and poets have made between the multi-media Dada movement and modern electronic poetry.
