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Experimenting

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One of the things that annoys me most as a reader is when an author decides to get experimental. Now, don't get me wrong, finding new ways of writing and expressing yourself is a good thing. However, it's probably not the best idea to use symbols that vaguely resemble the letters you're trying to use to spell out words. Yes, it looks snazzy and very hip, but it distracts from what's really going on in the poem. A poem's form and its subject should compliment each other. It's rare that such extreme formal experimentation actually improves a poem's effect. I think that bill bisset is a great example of taking formal experimentation too far. Drawing cartoonish pictures, titling them, and calling them “visual poems” seems ridiculous. I just don't see how visual poetry becomes different from visual art. Poetry and art aren't simply categories that we fit things into. They're mediums that we use to express our thoughts and feelings. This means that they can (and should) change over time, but this change should never become the focus of the art. Courageously stretching the boundaries of what a poem can be just isn't a meaningful pursuit anymore. Between the modernists and the post-modernists, it's nearly impossible to think of a (meaningful) boundary in poetry that remains.

Instead, what I'd like to see being experimented with are the changes that technology can bring to the table. With my limited knowledge, that's what I've started to try doing with The Oral Tradition. Letting the author of a poem speak directly to the reader gives the poem a whole other dimension and allows the author even more power to communicate exactly what is intended. Instead of needing to be within hearing range of a person, the internet allows us to share these readings around the globe whenever a reader/listener wants. Other lit magazines are well ahead of me here too: Blackbird and 2RiverView come to mind as excellent examples. I think it's time that we started taking full advantage of the tools at our disposal and using them to find new, exciting ways to communicate our thoughts and feelings.

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