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.

The Poetic Agent

In his Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley states:

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”

Although it is lovely to imagine a poet locked away in seclusion, composing lines of verse by candlelight, it is simply not a feature of the poets in hypermedia literature. One of the biggest aspects that has shifted between printed poetry and online poetry is the aspect of authorship. Stephanie Strickland’s hypertext poem, The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, is an excellent example of how the process of putting something online affects the authorship of the original work. Take a look at the following screen shot, captured from the “Contributors” page of the Ballad.

It took more than eighteen contributing factors, including the poet herself, to transfer this particular piece from paper to website. This greatly influences the manner in which we presently veiw the poet. He/She is no longer a nightingale in solitude as Shelley defined for us; perhaps envisioning a flock of nightingales flying through the night collectively as a legion would be a better analogy in our contemporary setting. The fact of the matter is that even if only one person composes the poem, the organization of the chosen words themselves, more than one person is involved in building the online representation of the words—be it a website designer that fits specific codes with the desired appearance of the page itself or an artist that allows their images to be placed alongside the stanza. Thus, the mulitplicity of authorship has altered the sense of what it means to be a poet.

“The task of assembling a hypermedia work, therefore, is complex as the writer must not only pay attention to the creation of visual and textual components, but also to the obvious or not so obvious permutations and combinations that could result through hyper-linking.” – Jaishree K. Odin

Additionally, the poet must rethink the visual representation of the poem to further the reader’s experience. In a hyper linked set of pages such as the Ballad, there are limitless combination as to how the poem itself can be read by the audience. This is definitely something the poet would have to consider when composing the poem itself. It would be required for the poem to make sense in many different orders, so certain traditional forms of narrative would be somewhat confusing for the reader in this fragmentary formatting. In turn, the actual writing process itself is modified to fit the constraints of the internet and the tools that coincide with placing something online. Ultimately, the writers’ projection is skewed because he/she is no longer writing the poem for someone who can merely read from left to right, but someone who can employ the affordances of a website in its entirety.

When I say hello, you say goodbye

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.