How Poetry Has Evolved Online

What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way that Elvis has left the building? Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the backdoor and onto the Internet, where it is taking on new forms that look nothing like poetry. Poetry as we know it—sonnets or free verse on a printed page—feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality. But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.

Reference: The Writer as Meme Machine, by Kenneth Goldsmith.

I was schooled in poetry as something you read in a book and something you wrote on a printed page.  Until just a few years ago, I wrote poetry in a notebook, that is, hand-wrote it.  It wasn't difficult, though, to word-process my poems, as Microsoft Word set up a white blank page for me to type on.  At the end of the day, it was still old school.

Four years ago, two colleagues introduced me to kinetic poetry: The first video above is an example.  I was duly intrigued.  It was too costly to arrange for someone to do that for my poetry, so I shelved the idea.  I did begin to upload my poetry onto Facebook, but found its formatting limited and archaic.  The fact that I couldn't even indent or italicize annoyed me.

Then, two years ago I began to create videos of me reciting mine and others' poetry.  I navigated this transition well enough, but in truth I was reluctant to lose the integrity of poetry on the printed page, especially format and font.  Gladly, though, I accepted the need to re-imagine poetry.  If I were in fact going to present it in multimedia, then I needed to let my creativity, and the exigency of the medium, evolve how I presented it.

The second video prompts a collaboration between poetry and animation.  In the third video, you see how I navigate the print of my poem on PowerPoint and Movie Maker, and more importantly how René Magritte paintings, and René Magritte himself, were integral to my poem's creative evolution.

In the article I referenced, Goldsmith asks, How has the internet altered poetry?

Explore the answer.  Be creative in your evolution.