Category: Semi-lucid

Recently, one of my creations, game, game, game and again game has gone viral. Meaning the artwork has had over four million hits. Wow is right. And the work is highly experimental, with a retro game interface for somewhat abstract poetry (words).

I bring this up because the comments people write on blogs, forums or send to me directly can be lumped into a few categories. 1. What drugs am I on (the sad cliche that equates drug use with creativity). 2. they dont understand it, but they like it and it makes them think 3. they hate it and find it arty (to the point of the occasional threat) 4. they like parts of it…but not all….and want to experience more.

And these comments signal that one of digital poetry’s powers, its draws, its allure, is that it offers people who would normally never read poetry, a place, a foothold, a bridge to jump into the poem. There are, as Davin says, feelings they can access immediately via sounds, or movement, or interface, or play etc…. and once that bridge pulls them in…they can explore the more experimental bits….maybe not understanding, but at least feeling and thinking and experiencing…hmm….that sounds good…if you want you can read some of the comments via a google search:

What does a poem feel like? Eating. A poem feels like eating. What does the poem eat? The poem eats experience. And yet the poem is an experience. The poem therefore eats itself.

 

I think our lovely Davin is on to something here. Poetry has always been born from and constricted by the print page, the linear textual form. And yet, as I have argued before, texts are not simply words. Everything is a text. Signs, motions, sounds, interactions, all things are texts, communicating creatures. And digital poems eat these many and nearly infinite supply of texts (experiences) to create a wholly new experience.

 

But then the question I pose to everyone here is….what makes a digital poem, an electronic poem…an electronic poem? Or to put it a better way…..why couldn’t we say that all net artworks, new media artworks are digital poems? If we extend the idea of text to all experiences and objects and signs etc…then all creative works could be construed as digital poems.  

 

Or do we say that digital poetry must either follow directly from a print poem..ie a translation of that print poem into movement and interface?  Or do we say that digital poems are simply another way of displaying, albeit in an interactive way, word based poetry?

 

Or maybe the difference is in the construction…how the artist/writer builds their creation.  Which brings

 us back to Davin’s point/question and feelings. Maybe the digital poetry is creating experiences whose components are those feelings, those images and imagery, those metaphoric movements.

 

Hmm……more to think about…..but what are other’s thoughts?

When travelling, days, as in labels, as in this is Saturday in the gold mine region of Australia, are confused. I am watching more than writing. But right now writing more than watching.

 

Davin asks about time. Time in a poem. Time is this.   

 

Does he mean cadence? Is he an angry boar released in Arkansas by an ex-prince, rich and moved to American. Maybe he misses the hunting of boars, the slow and then fast runs through forests. Firing guns and releasing dogs.  But then Davin won’t catch all his angry swines (swine do not need plurality, vote, vote), and later football teams will mascot his failed hunts. Somewhere in those two sentences, the subject was turned, interrogated to exhaustion. No will. Nothing to determine ownership after death.

 

So I’m staying in an orphanage,  brick and wood raftered complex recently adopted by a mega-resort conglomeration. It is semi-cold here, around 40 or 50 (American style metrics) and there is an outdoor pool, semi-heated and semi-indoors. Last night I went for a lonely swim, chlorine fog and the side pool drains made conversational noises. I imagined a small group of important men just outside the fog, smoking various combustibles and discussing what to do with the unmarked orphan graves found at the lakes edge, always at the lake’s edge. My room has high ceilings and borrowed thrift (or opp for southern hemi-kids) furniture. Down most hallways is a common room called a library, ceramic books, four together with titles suggesting romance and science, book ends replacing the books themselves. There are mega-resort conglomeration magazines and brochures for wine tours, craft tours, high adventure experiences in the lows of this valley. 

 

These haphazard words are being typed at a blue table in a public Library. The main library mind you, in this town, almost a city, named Ballarat. There is fast wireless now, it being around 11 in the morning on a Saturday, but children and old men with new laptops are filling the spaces, so that speed will wane, cold and sunny outside.

 

Across from me is one metal row of the reference section (numbers 304.4 to 425 ONF). Four titles:  Dictionary of Wars, Rivers for Life, Protocol and Producers, Convicts.  A large green book, faded and binding worn, has papers/notes fountaining from the top (nouns as verbs as nouns). I want to read them, but I most likely won’t.

 

From behind the woman in the white hooded and fur rimmed coat appeared to be a child. Turning around aged her over 50 years.

 

Each paragraph is smaller than the paragraph preceding.

 

Trend now ends.  I am thinking about interfaces. Many months ago, Christine Hume, a curious and long angled poet, recently a mother, and who took me to see a Rushdie multimedia play in

Michigan, gave me a poem to turn into a digital creature. And since then I have done nothing, but play in my isolated brain (the isolated brain, a movie starring ex-NBA star Horace Grant and the cliché librarian with short red dyed hair and permanent, heavy reading glasses turned up and down for check-out stages). Her poem will start me away, away, like the tightest of jeans.  Scroll down to read, hoods that cant be seen while driving or parking.