digital poetry

How has the Internet transformed Chinese poetry today? How has the democratization of publishing poetry online challenged the traditional gatekeepers, and how has this affected the quality of modern poetry? Heather Inwood explores these questions and reveals how such tectonic shifts have reinforced the status of poetry as a social form of culture, one that possesses great symbolic importance for China no matter who is doing the writing or critiquing.

‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’: Transformation Waterscapes in Coimbatore from past to present through digital poetryThe digital poetry ‘Lost water! Remains Scape?’ is written in Tamil by the environmental poet Mohamed Rafiq and in English by Shanmugapriya T, the co-author of this paper. It is created using 2D and 3D environments, and photos in Blender and Adobe Animate software. The 2D and 3D environments reflect the narrative about the ecosystem of waterscapes in the past and the photo animations represent the current situation of the water bodies in Coimbatore, the southern region in South India. This digital poetry is created based on the findings from our AHRC-funded project ‘Digital Innovations in Water Scarcity, Coimbatore, South India’. This interdisciplinary project investigates the changed waterscape in Coimbatore, South India across 150 years by using range of materials and activities including studying historical maps and satellite imagery, and conducting interviews with local farmers, activists and NGOs. This digital poetry is an endeavour to bridge gap between digital literature and digital humanities. The questions we ask in this paper are how can the adoption/integration of digital literary method be an effective agency and actor to represent the environmental objects and disseminate the findings for targeted audiences? How can tools and methods contribute to the digital humanities and digital literature grounded in materials from the global south? The main aim of this paper is to explore the digital literary method as an effective agency to communicate the research findings to the broader public.

Reminiscence is the primary theme of our digital poetry. It will be mediated through text, animations and images. Waterscape is an imperative source and forms a conducive ecological community in every villages of the region Coimbatore. It is a primary source for drinking, irrigation and other economic and cultural activities. However, the forgotten waterscapes due to drought, dereliction and climate change have become conduit of drainage waters, and garbage dumbing areas. The photos that have taken during our field visits depict the current condition of waterbodies among which most of them are in dreadful state. On the other hand, the oral testimonies of the local farmers illustrate a different situation of waterscapes a few decades ago. They narrated how they were blessed to have had a healthy waterscape in the past. They also told us that there were particular flora and fauna that belong to the region had been destroyed and some of the specific species such as Noyyal Otter had gone extinct. The interactive 2D and 3D environment of digital poetry will provide a revisitation to such lost waterscapes created based on the oral testimonies. It will also portray the current condition of waterscapes through photo animation and text narration. This digital poetry will be disseminated to students, scholars, activists and the general public through our academic and NGO partners and local schools and colleges. Feedback and some of the interviews conducted will be made available via the project website.

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break. I argue that these poems, by breaking, challenge systems that support institutional racism, violence, economic disparity, and other unjust social phenomena. I then explore poetic breakage in live performance. I look specifically at the Black Took Collective, a group of performance poets who utilize digital media in live performance to subvert expectations that an audience might have regarding race, gender, and poetry’s place in the academy. The final chapter is a demonstration of practice-based research and a discussion of the role of this kind of research in an evolving English department. I offer two examples of practice-based research in literary studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver Poetry Map.

D. Fox Harrell considers what is computational about composition, and describes the GRIOT system for generating literary texts.

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by D. Fox Harrell

Although the most recent curricular documents issued by the Portuguese Ministry of Education (ME, 2017; ME, 2018) recommend students to read multimodal texts, there is still a print-based culture among Portuguese schools and among language and literature teachers. As part of the project “Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context”, held at the Centre for Portuguese Literature – University of Coimbra, we have already conducted some experiments with digital narrative in Portugal (Machado et alii, 2018), which we hope to be extended by the inclusion of Alice Inanimada (the Portuguese version of Inanimate Alice) in the National Reading Plan in 2018, as Ana Maria Machado, the project coordinator, presented at the ELO Conference 2018. However, we do not have available data concerning teaching digital poetry to children and teenagers in our country, which led me to include Cantiga in the corpus for the empirical research I am conducting for my doctoral thesis in Materialities of Literature. Cantiga, a combinatory poem (https://www.telepoesis.net/cantiga/) by Rui Torres (2012), retrieves the homonym poem by Salette Tavares (1967), in which the experimental poet recreated the structure, the rhythm, the vocabulary and the ambiance of Galician-Portuguese medieval songs, particularly the ones from the “cantigas de amigo” genre (characterized by a feminine voice). It is the first, a “prototype” (Torres, 2012), of a set of poems to be created in which contemporary poets dialogue with medieval songs. The textual engine created by Rui Torres operates lexical permutations that lead to semantic variations in a text that presents itself to the reader in a digital screen parchment, more specifically in a fac-simile folio from the Cancioneiro da Ajuda. Readers are thus confronted with the intersection of media, forms and languages from both medieval and contemporary times, as well as with the different voices that emerge from the electronic poem. As Portela states (2012: 49-50), “Rui Torres’ generative text is a text upon another text which was already a text upon another text, showcasing citation and iteration as exponential functions in the production of literary meaning.” Moreover, the poem repeats itself in a mirror-like position and symmetrical relation, written, on the left side, using a gothic font, and, on the right, on a font evoking graffiti art. Therefore, past and present reflect one another in a mirror game, progressively changing through the combinatory movement. Although Rui Torres’ poetic engine contains lexical items collected exclusively from the Galician Portuguese medieval songbooks corpus, it also allows the reader to introduce new words and to produce new meaning(s). Readers (now writers) can crystallize their own poems, publishing them on the Poemário blog (https://telepoesis.net/poemario/). In this paper I intend to show how 10th graders from Portuguese schools read Cantiga and how they reacted to reading digital poetry, a first-time experience for all of them, by analysing the answers they gave on a questionnaire created for evaluating the reception of the digital poem. By re-membering and (re-)re-creating “cantigas de amigo”, Rui Torres defies readers not only to unveil all those voices that cross and emerge from this “shapeshifting text” (Côrtes Maduro: 2018), but also to join their own to the stream of voices, creating new poems. So I will talk about the importance of the blog Poemário has for students and for teachers, as an opportunity to engage in a new creative experience.