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.