Writing Poetry For A Digital World
Digital poetry, a new genre or type of poetry, is actually not new. It has been in the making since the late fifties when computer geeks then would play with textual form, on the computer, to generate a composite of electronic text, image, and sound delivered as a combined kind of performance art (think Jean Francois Detaille and his “Kick the Bucket” piece) and visual, or concrete, poem (think ee cummings and “In-Just”).
Today, six decades in, we can do what the first digital poets did and the poets and performance artists do and can “write” for an e-audience with an even greater offering of and access to a multitude of e-formats. Some of the creation tools for these include but are not limited to
The digital camera
A draw/photo suite
An e-book publisher
The laptop or desktop computer
The human voice
The written word
The variety of digital poetry that can and does result is even more limitless, presenting as many possibilities as the creator’s imagination permits, but here are some examples of poetry that evokes movement, animation, liveliness itself:
The jigsaw puzzle that scrambles and comes back together in “pieces”, by Robert Kendall
The visual collage of paint and poem for the readerly space of the web which discusses and at the same time performs “splintering”, by Diane Caney
The black void surprise of composition and computerized voice which involves (or requires) user interactivity to scroll over the page for meaning, in Tammy McGovern’s “TranceMissions”.
Again, the possibilities are exponential, dependent upon only the limits of user/creator minds.