Kinetic/Interactive Poetry

Poems are to many a somewhat divisive literary medium. Many don't love them -personally I always get stuck in a limbo between not trying to read too deeply into things and missing the point entirely- and there are so many forms of poetry that it's fair to say it might be the most diverse form of literary art. 

This week I focused on In the White Darkness, and I made a point of not reading up on the piece before reading through it. The interactive elements let you click through strings of images and sounds; many are related or very similar to one another, but even following the visual strings does little to help differentiate a set path to take. After spending some time with the poem I read back about the authors' intentions with emulating the life of someone living with Alzheimer's. The disjointed images are meant to represent the lack of order or constancy in the memories of someone with the disorder. Now, the strings of thought that have very little reasoning to their placement except for a vague similarity in tone make sense as a reflection of the uncertainty I'm sure you'd feel when you can't fully trust your own memories. 

To touch on the 'medium becoming the metaphor' and the inverse, by fragmenting the story with disorderly images and sounds that retain a tangible similarity, the viewer is pushed into that same perspective of confusion and difficulty. I have a family member with Alzheimer's, and the moments of clarity interspersed with a displaced sense of time felt very accurate to my own experience. Poems are inherently empathetic pieces of literature. They're more open, honest, and often reflect as much as they can in as little text as possible. The empathy of In the White Darkness comes from stepping into the shoes of someone who can't fully trust their own recollection, and the medium of strings of memory delivers a pretty emotional punch. It's super intriguing to see an emotional outlet like poetry be recontextualized this way.