Why do the boundaries between poetry and other art forms matter?
I ask in order to follow up on your timely proposal to see what changes technology can bring to literary magazines like The Oral Tradition and The Writers Block. There are so many digital technologies available nowadays to writers that media players with voice recordings seem almost conservative by comparison. See Dakota by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries or the Inanimate Alice series by Bradfield Productions, for example. Both of these examples seem innovative in a very literary fashion, even though they combine a variety of media. And I would argue that the questions about whether or not they qualify as poetry doesn't really matter to their value and force as an effective, verbal art form.
That's not at all to suggest, however, that sound recordings like those utilized by The Oral Tradition, Blackbird, and 2RiverView are archaic or not extremely effective. I think that being able to hear the voices of the men and women behind the words on the page adds a level of affect to the poetry that really makes it come alive. As the About page of TOT indicates, though, vocal recordings of poetry are more of a look backwards to poetry's roots in oral traditions (ballads, etc.) than a look forward.
To be a little provocative: how can we take full advantage of the tools at our disposal to find new and exciting ways to communicate our feelings if we're bound up with anxiety about whether or not we're producing "real" poetry?
Connected to all this, I would argue, is that formally experimental pieces of literary art mentioned above are beginning to change the way we read. Even though the computer screen is designed to mimic the printed page, the two mediums are fundamentally different. What innovative digital poetry is attempting to do is, like you say, actually capitalize on the media differences between the screen and the printed page. This involves the introduction of sound, Flash technology (moving text and colours, etc.), and even interactive elements that involve the reader to some degree, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel (hypertexts). These formal experiments ask the reader of this new poetry (or whatever you want to call it) to read the screen as a screen as opposed to as a printed page. I'm not exactly clear on what the impact of this perceptual shift is or will be yet, but I think that is partly because the technology and experiments are still so new that its not yet clear in general. Its an interesting question to pay attention to though: With all the new technologies impacting online, digital writing, how do we read now?
I ask in order to follow up on your timely proposal to see what changes technology can bring to literary magazines like The Oral Tradition and The Writers Block. There are so many digital technologies available nowadays to writers that media players with voice recordings seem almost conservative by comparison. See Dakota by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries or the Inanimate Alice series by Bradfield Productions, for example. Both of these examples seem innovative in a very literary fashion, even though they combine a variety of media. And I would argue that the questions about whether or not they qualify as poetry doesn't really matter to their value and force as an effective, verbal art form.
That's not at all to suggest, however, that sound recordings like those utilized by The Oral Tradition, Blackbird, and 2RiverView are archaic or not extremely effective. I think that being able to hear the voices of the men and women behind the words on the page adds a level of affect to the poetry that really makes it come alive. As the About page of TOT indicates, though, vocal recordings of poetry are more of a look backwards to poetry's roots in oral traditions (ballads, etc.) than a look forward.
To be a little provocative: how can we take full advantage of the tools at our disposal to find new and exciting ways to communicate our feelings if we're bound up with anxiety about whether or not we're producing "real" poetry?
Connected to all this, I would argue, is that formally experimental pieces of literary art mentioned above are beginning to change the way we read. Even though the computer screen is designed to mimic the printed page, the two mediums are fundamentally different. What innovative digital poetry is attempting to do is, like you say, actually capitalize on the media differences between the screen and the printed page. This involves the introduction of sound, Flash technology (moving text and colours, etc.), and even interactive elements that involve the reader to some degree, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel (hypertexts). These formal experiments ask the reader of this new poetry (or whatever you want to call it) to read the screen as a screen as opposed to as a printed page. I'm not exactly clear on what the impact of this perceptual shift is or will be yet, but I think that is partly because the technology and experiments are still so new that its not yet clear in general. Its an interesting question to pay attention to though: With all the new technologies impacting online, digital writing, how do we read now?
I agree with most of what you've said here Ben. I think that the boundaries between media only matter on the critical side of things. They're useful categories that let us compare similar works and talk about them in a more meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteI do take issue with you saying that "vocal recordings of poetry are more of a look backwards." Although this is definitely true of The Oral Tradition, this is because the magazine has been specifically designed to encourage submissions that have more in common with older forms and styles. The idea of having an unchanging oral accompaniment to a poem is as much a break from poetry's oral roots as the printed word was. Instead of relying on memory tricks to remember the plot and basic formulation of a story/poem, you could have a story that was guaranteed to be the same every time. It's a refinement of the art, allowing the author to communicate their meaning more obviously. I believe that adding an audio track to a poem does the same thing. Rather than simply being a step backwards to older traditions, it gives an author even more control over the work, which I think is a genuine step forward in a new direction.