Kinetic Poetry: the medium is the metaphor

I generally don’t love poetry too much, but to be honest these works this week really blew me away. Dear e.e. by Lori Janis and Ingrid Ankerson was able to create so much beauty and meaning in its digital form. First, you hear music that’s choppy, distant, echoey. Then the dream erupts into fast cycling animation. Pieces of a sketched apartment fly by while letters zip around the screen. The place is dismembered into oddly placed pieces of furniture (a sink by the door, the fridge in front of the window) with words attached to each piece when you hover over them. I found it very illustrating of a dream: fragments you try to piece together, things that seem real but don’t make true sense, adaptions of reality. The odd almost horror-psychedelic music cycling in the background with the images and letters flying around make it a surreal experience. Close to reality, but not quite, just like a dream about someone that you aren’t quite sure how to interpret. 

I also enjoyed Cruising, especially because of the child-like mid-century voiceover of the poem that plays. In her voice you can hear the optimism of what these teenagers might discover cruising around town. The poem cycles images of the town in a fast-paced strip. The music rises, falls, and repeats. The line “in a car we couldn’t yet take to the world” emphasizes how the poem makes the reader feel trapped in this driving cycle around town, illustrating that small-town teenage desire to find some meaning in the limited world available to you. 

The textbook’s note of “letters and words as manipulable material objects” is definitely seen in these works. Metaphor and meaning can be developed even further for reader experience when letters, like in Dear e.e. are manipulated and reconstructed. I think it also echoes the idea of Letterism discussed in the textbook, where deconstruction of language and rebuilding it to an essential level would result in “letters encountered as objects and sounds encountered not as semantic form but pure auditory experience”. I also appreciated this chapter’s discussion of technological advancements that make the layering of sound, image, and text possible for kinetic poetry. It seems that the programming aspect of these poems is as much an art as the poems themselves.