Hypermedia literature is a hot topic of interest for literary and internet theorists alike, and the “online poem” is no exception. Poetry has struggled with finding an definitive identity for centuries, from Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry in the late 16th Century to Theodor Adorno’s On Lyric Poetry and Society in the 20th Century. I’m not exactly concerned with what makes a poem a poem. My focus for this rhetorical analysis has become more concentrated on what makes online poetry different from the printed versions we’ve been exposed to since grade school. There are obviously going to be many gains and losses resulted from this transition.
For instance, the particular online object I chose to analyze is Stephanie Strickland’s The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot (http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/). The original poem was published traditionally (http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/strickland.html) and later adapted into a hyper textual arrangement of HTML pages, encryption, and formatted images. There is, surprisingly, much more threaded analysis on this poem than I expected to be on the web considering I was randomly introduced to this poem by another professor at the University of Georgia. Unlike most of the discussions you will come across after typing the poem’s name into a search engine, my thoughts on the topic will not center around the actual thematic possibilities of the the work as a piece of a literature. There are three areas I would like to explore in my next three blogs on this subject. The first will be about the poetic agent—how does the creation process shift for a writer wishing to implement their poem(s) into the web? Is it better or worse than being published on paper? The second blog will be about me, you, us—the reader of the poem. What aspects of this new form of literary media changes the audience that beholds it? Is it a good change or bad change? And the third and final blog of the series will explore the images in the Ballad and also how the Coda portion of the linkages helps and hinders the audience.
“In complex hypermedia works of literature, there is a dynamic relationship between form and content. Such works retain the best of print literature in their artful use of language, imagery, metaphors, as well as various literary devices, while exploiting the potential of the electronic medium to the fullest.” -Jaishree K. Odin’s Image and Text in Hypermedia Literature: The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.
