This week we took a look at E-literature, something I have honestly never heard of. As I was looking at the different forms of E-literature, which refers to works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer, I came across E-poetry. I personally am a fanatic for good poetry and creative pieces, so I had to go in depth with the explanation of this particular form of literature.
E-Poetry is, according to ILooveePoetry.com, poetry that arises from the engagement with the possibilities offered by digital media, which is basically a very cool way for poets to have their poetry displayed to their audience. As many times as I have taken poetry and creative writing classes, I have never heard of this particular form of poetry and being that our world is so tech-based today. The site I was looking at, Iloveepoetry.com, gave some great genres under the general umbrella of E-Poetry. I have listed them below:
- Generative poetry is produced by programming algorithms and drawing from corpora to create poetic lines. This is the oldest e-poetic genre and remains relevant today through e-literary genres like the bot.
- Code poetry is written for a dual audience: computer and human readers.
- Visual digital poetry arises from Visual, Concrete, and Lettrist poetic traditions and is extended by
- Kinetic poetry, which uses the computer’s ability to display animation and changing information over time.
- Multimedia poetry incorporates audio, video, images, text, and other modes of communication in its strategies.
- Interactive poetry incorporates input from the reader in the poem’s expressive strategies.
- Hypertext poetry uses nodes and links to structure the poem into spaces for the reader to explore.
Each genre has its own basic structure that makes the particular work fit into this category. The two I found most interesting was Multimedia, which incorporates audio, sound, videos, and text in order to gain the audience’s interest, and Interactive poetry which asks for the readers undivided attention because they are apart of it.
I looked at a work that was in both of the categories I took an interest too called “Gabriella Infinita” by Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez. Here is a picture of the work itself
The work took me through a lot of links which kept me involved and interested. I wanted to keep going through it just to understand how it progressed and where it would end. understanding the time and patience it must have to the poet also gave me a great sense of how invested he truly was to get his piece across to readers. Even though this author typically used more pictures it still told a story, that was greatly captured and could be understood.
For my personal final project for this class, I will be working on my own piece of E-Poetry and hopefully will gain more depth and understanding from working on one myself. I can see how E-literature, in general, can be a great source of expression, especially coming from an era where technology is so important, and consistently used. This should be fun, and I hope next week have some great content to post dealing with my own E-poetry.