Week 6 Blog: Daniel Spargo

 I found Scott Rettberg's look into kinetic and interactive poetry to be quite interesting. He certainly helps to allow people to understand how poetry continues to evolve in the digital age, such as by examining how digital media's unique characteristics—such as interactivity, multimodality, and nonlinearity—serve as metaphors that shape and redefine literary expression. This in particular is an important theme from the chapter because it discusses the main way in which poetry has evolved. Digital media has allowed poets to create works of art that serve as a visual representation of the mood or theme of the poem itself. This also extends to other forms of digital media. The endless visual concepts that can be applied to a work to enhance and/or change the meaning make the writing so much more engaging. 

I chose to look in to Dear e.e. by Lori Janis and Ingrid Ankerson. This work was a true example of how interactive and kinetic poetry has become and serves as a metaphor. The project is a letter to the poet E.E. Cummings, who was known for his avant garde works, making poetry that was linguistically and visually perplexing and frantic, straying away from much of the traditional poetry scene. The work was a short Flash project that whipped across the screen in a loop, seemingly representing a frantic dreamscape, while the wake up button cues a short string of text before sending you back to sleep. The dreamscape seems to be representation of E.E. Cummings rearranging the apartment, making it seem random and out of place, quite like how his poems often appear at a glance. The fast scrolling movement also gives the same sense as reading one of his works, as it makes you dizzy trying to wrap your head around it and figure out whats going on.