Poetic literacy is thriving in online spaces. Teachers and researchers have much to learn from how adolescents are engaging with poetry in the digital
In 2013, as a part of the Culture Programme of Ireland’s EU presidency, The Poetry Project was set up by the Kinsale Arts Festival in partnership with Poetry Ireland and the Royal Hibernian Academy. In the project, poems by established and emerging Irish poets were coupled with works by Irish video artists. The resulting collaborative works were published each week, for nine months, on the project website and emailed to recipients in Ireland and in more than one hundred countries around the world. This presentation focused on how the verbal, visual and auditory elements of the works published within The Poetry Project simultaneously enact and reflect the challenges and discontinuities related to representations of place, space and landscape in the poetry of the digital era.
This is the first poem written specifically for Internet 2. The poem is a world with 24 avatars, each a different word. Each reader, in order to read the poem, must establish his or her own presence in this textworld through a verbal avatar. As remote participants choose a word and log on with their word-avatar, they contribute with their word choices to determine the semantic sphere of that particular readerly experience. Once in the world, they make decisions about where to go. In so doing, they move towards or away from other words (i.e., towards or away from other participants), producing a syntax of transient meanings based on the constant movement, as well as the approximation and isolation of the words. For example: the word “blood” moving towards the word “abloom” has a very different meaning from the word“titanium” moving away from the word “violet”. Here is the complete list of avatars readers may choose from: abloom, blood, canyon, daze, eleventh, fabric, grace, hour, ion, jet, kayak, lumen, mist, nebula, oblivion, pluvial, quanta, radial, sole, titanium, umbra, violet, xeric, year, zenith. This poem was experimentally read online throughout 1999 using a special server in the Art and Technology Department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
(source: author)
First produced in 1998, Bas Böttcher’s looppool marks a specific generational moment in the history of online poetry and netart. Simple yet delightful, its palindrome title playfully describes the Sisyphean loop of wandering red billiard balls through a textual maze composed of scattered objects, thoughts, and actions. The reader can either passively watch as these spherical flaneurs wander along the pre-selected path or click to alter their course. Rather than convey the sense of an infinite possibility space, the paths of these poems are highly constrained. Like a Möbius strip, there is no outside to this looppool and regardless of the direction taken, the leisurely poem will wander forever along an unbroken loop.
(Source: editorial statement, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Three)
