Additional Exercise
Delaney Collins
Opinion: Why I Make Digital Poetry
Important Note on Creative Bias: Before I begin to exclaim all of the reasons why I find the digital world to be a far more tantalizing space to create art, I’d like to start by stating my bias: I’m not really good at anything else and it’s the only art form that’s resulted in profit for me.
The world of writing is often a place people go to feel protected from the content bustle and boom of the ever urbanizing world around us. We romanticize the handwritten, the sound of the typewriter, and the smell of vanilla-infused decay of book adhesive. However, these modalities begin to fray in the digital world: a never-ending Iron Man challenge of 140 character freudian slips, political novellas, and social haikus. The world of literature is, therefore, at an impasse: do we throw out our kindles and dedicate ourselves to filling Ikea bookshelves, or do we embrace Jeff Bezos with the unkempt fervor of Bertha Mason? I think the answer is somewhere in the middle: with poetry. Poetry is a form of writing that is quickly consumed but not easily digested. As Ben Lerner wrote in his book The Hatred of Poetry, “Since language is the stuff of the social, and poetry the expression in language of our irreducible individuality, our personhood is tied up with our poethood”. To me, this makes poetry the perfect candidate for the digital world— it is an expression of individuality that breathes empathy into the reader and their world. However, the key to existing in a digital space is to make an impact in a short period of time. Literature once existed in a world where its largest competition for entertainment was the Bible. Now, as writers, we have to adapt. We have to make literature a multi-stimuli experience: there must be visual movement, musical attribution, and, of course, the writing itself. I believe this is most easily done with poetry. It is generally short (no offense to John Milton), any visual attribution can be abstract and requires limited production value, and copy-right free music can provide meaningful tone to the poem. Not to mention, a video is far more accessible, far more easily digested, and far more likely to have an impact on the average consumer than the physical form. In equating the closest physical representation of an artistic rendition of poetry— the artist’s book— to this digital rendering of poetry, I find that accessibility equalizes the tactile losses of the digital form. Now, to clarify, I’m not saying that all poetry should be admonished unless digitally rendered. I believe there is still value to the true readers, the true writers, and the true artists in the tangible— and this is the truly timeless and eternal version of poetry. (You can look at Button Poetry’s viewer average for proof). But in considering the dissemination of literature as a modern and consumable art form, the digital rendering of poetry seems like a viable and important step to take.
