Puddles, Paddling, and E-Poetry

If asked before I enrolled in this class, I would have never been able to answer the question, what is E-poetry? Right off the top of my head I would maybe say just “poems that are on a computer.” Now that I have a slight idea about digital humanities, I obviously know that E-poetry is poetry that arises from engagement with the possibilities offered by digital media. So I would have only been touching the surface with my answer.

There are 7 different kinds of electronic poetry. These include:

                          i.            Generative Poetry

        a.       Programming algorithms and drawing from corpora to create poetic lines

                        ii.            Code Poetry

        a.       Written for digital and human audience

                      iii.            Visual Digital Poetry

        a.       Comes from visual and concrete traditions

                       iv.            Kinetic Poetry

        a.       uses the computer’s ability to display animation and changing information over time

                        v.            Multimedia Poetry

        a.       incorporates audio, video, images, text, and other modes of communication in its strategies

                      vi.            Interactive Poetry

        a.       incorporates input from the reader in the e-poem’s expressive strategies

                     vii.            Hypertext Poetry

        a.       uses nodes and links to structure the poem into spaces for the reader to explore

E-poetry is a lot of fun because it is unique to every other piece of literacy I have read throughout my entire schooling career. I was actually unprepared to know how to grasp the ideas from the poems due to its uniqueness.

My favorite piece of E-poetry was “Puddle” and “Paddle” by Neil Hennessy. These 2 poems are more of kinetic concrete poems.

In “Puddle”, only 3 words are effectively used to describe how a puddle is formed. It goes from “drip” to “dribble” to “ripple” in a simple animation move. But the animation is particular here because it correlates directly to how it would happen. First the slow drips, then the stream of dribbles, and lastly the ripple made in the puddle.

“Paddle” is done virtually the same way. It uses 5 words with specific animation to basically define the term. For example, the “e” from the word “peddle” is rotated around the “p” imitating a person peddling on a bike.