Week 6: Kinetic Poetry Sasha

 Poetry in the digital literature world is not static and its meaning changes based on how you interact with it. This chapter delves into kinetic poetry and its place within the digital medium. Along with words, it often involves visual, auditory, motion, or other similar components. 

Rettberg quotes Álvaro Seiça, saying that “spatial and temporal dimensions bridge notions that go radically beyond the print paradigm – in which content and representation prevail, and, at best, form suggests. In kinetic poetry, space and time present themselves, they materialize, but they also represent” (Rettberg 240-241). It would be difficult to explain and derive the meaning into words without having each effect happening simultaneously. When words disappear, fall, or  move, and the other effects are occurring in the background, you cannot describe this properly through simple typology. Concrete poetry is something that I recall doing in middle school; making shapes and symbols with the poem, creating an additional visual meaning. Later on in the chapter, Rettberg says that “The digital turn [of poetry] might in fact mark the point at which these forms have ceased to be avant-garde, as moving letters, inventive typography, integrated imagery, and even nonlinearity are common aspects of everyday textuality in contemporary media ranging from television to the Web” (Rettberg 264). It’s fascinating to think about how the digital world has taken these artistic mediums and normalized them for everyday usage. Hypertext is unavoidable. Motion techniques of kinetic poetry are used for ads. As technology continues to develop, there will be even more ways to create kinetic poetry. 

As a side tangent, this made me think about augmented reality and virtual reality. These mediums can both become canvases for kinetic poetry. I think that VR headset could provide a new angle to the genre since it’s like you’re actually there, experiencing it with your own eyes. I’m not sure how it would work though. Maybe this has already been explored? I’m not sure. 

Of the links given, the piece “in the white darkness” stood out the most to me. Although I’m still not too familiar with kinetic poetry and how to extract the full meaning out of the poem, this one I found to be the most interesting. Given its connection to Alzheimers—something which runs in my family and greatly affected my great grandmother Ninel—it brought tears to my eyes. Within the coming years, it will begin to affect my mother. Her memory is already quite poor, and witnessing this happen before your very eyes is terrifying. Of course, it must be even more so for the person affected. Watching the images drift, fade, and fall apart was calming and heartbreaking.