Hey you; you with the face!

So how do these shifts in what it means to be a poetic agent affect the readers, the audience, the “scene” to which the poet speaks? After all, if the actual definition of a poet itself is at stake by transferring poetry into an online medium, there has to be an impact on he/she that views the poetry in this new format. I think where I left off on the last section is a good place to begin with this one. In regards to the Ballad, the hyper linked system the whole poem operates through changes the way we read it. Unlike most websites that do not explain to the user how to actually use them, the Ballad gives us some options. Study the following screen shot for a moment.

The link-driven reading requires you to employ the linking system that is reflected through different words in their respective lines that have a link attached to them. The complete reading (the only reading in which you read the poem from beginning to end as it was published) merely requires you to click on each image from page to page. Poetry has always been a subjective practice of intellect, but with hypermedia literature, there is even more subjectivity involved. The reader is bestowed with great power; power that can either make or break their interpretation of the poem; after all, the reader physically control how the poem is read.

“The aim of the hypermedia work thus is to present a very integrated piece that brings together different discourses in seemingly coherent fashion, while providing sufficient openings, so readers can relate to it from many different perspectives.”-Odin

The way the reader looks at poetry via either that of a positive or negative light is also skewed. Someone who  may typically dislike poetry may be more drawn to the online medium of the art form because of it’s use of images, fonts, color coding, etc. As a whole, it is more aesthetically pleasing to admire. On the other hand, a developed English major such as myself may not be as turned on by the idea of something as profound as poetry being placed online. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m still stuck in the print mode of literature. I prefer to read poetry printed on the page. To me, the images are more sublime when conjured by one’s own mind, instead of being provided with an image of the site creator(s)’ picking. This, however, is also a subjective change. The negative and positive opinions of multimedia literature varies from person to person.