Digital Poetry

I find the melding of images and poetry to be fascinating. I enjoyed viewing the work of Thom Swiss because one could "read" his poetry numerous times and never have the same outcome. My poem is nothing like that, very linear because I lack the technical know-how to create something interactive, but I think it would be neat to learn how to do something like that.

I see the use of digital poetry as having great potential in the classroom particularly with middle and high school students. I think they'd really enjoy the experience of finding images to compliment text. By using hypertext, or doing something similar to what Thom did in his work would be really exciting.

While images are powerful, I do feel like when the author chooses the images to go along with a text, it takes a bit of the ability to imagine away from the reader. When I read things, I like to imagine in my mind how things look, how they unfold, and when the author does that for me, it takes away a bit of that ability from me. I liken this experience to going to see a movie that was based on a book. I may have imagined characters to look and behave one way, but the director and producers interpret things differently than I, and the characters might be nothing like I had hoped, leaving me sadly disappointed.

Due to the visual nature of the assignment, I had a lot of trouble completing the task. Someone else had to fit the pictures with the text, size the images and insert transitions for me because iMovie is not visually accessible to me. As a student in a class, being asked to use iMovie might be a very frustrating experience because it takes the student's independence away to a degree. I have not, as of yet, come up with a more accessible video production software though, so iMovie might be, at this time, as good as it gets.

Nevertheless, I hope that you enjoy my poem. It is entitled, "Today on Facebook" and is an original poem I wrote while in a class with Thom Swiss. I wrote it during the period of class when we were studying list poems, specifically Shards of Memory and how playing with time and fragmented ideas can be formatted into a poem. I used actual fragments of statuses from my own facebook profile. You'll have to excuse the blurriness of some of the pictures. They also were taken (mostly) from Facebook, but true to life, sometimes profile pictures on the site aren't exactly representative of top-notch photography but rather shotty cell phone pics.