Dreaming of Sea Anemones in Utah

Poetics – An Artistic Statement on the Creation:
“Dreaming of Sea Anemones in Utah: a Digital Pantoum”

I began with my poem “Dreaming of Sea Anemones in Utah: A Pantoum” for the same reason I applied the Pantoum form to the print poem in the first place – the echoing of lines gone by fit the theme of remembering and feeling displaced that I was reaching for with the poem. To push this theme further by hyper-textualizing the poem seemed a natural fit. Little did I realize how far I would stretch the original material.

In looking to how to translate my print poem to hypertext, I knew I needed to make the poem accessible such that the viewer would ultimately determine the final poem read, but I also sought to preserve the original nature of the pantoum structure. I initially discarded an idea to present the poem and provide pull-down menus so the viewer could change individual lines because there would not be enough interaction and the end product would be truly artificial. I decided to split the poem into (initially) five screens, one for each stanza, and link between them.

Designing the page itself, I wanted to focus on a very clean, simple environment. I went against all my training and experience and produced a site with my first black background in eight years of writing web pages – black just seemed to let the themes and ideas of the poem reverberate better, while the dark color contrasted some of the dominant images of the poem such as salt, dawn, watching the ocean, etc, providing an additional visual dissonance. I toyed with making each line a bitmap of text instead of using actual text because, inspired by Bolter’s “Seeing and Writing,” I sought more control of the digital page than the handful of fonts provides. Alas, the loading of the separate images as well as the inherent tediousness of trying to make each line as tiny an image (filesize) as possible made me turn to back to html text in an effort to keep it simple.

After the initial linking of the five stanzas, I found myself completely unsatisfied – there was too little linking. In an effort to create more links, I used my notes on the original poem to compose an additional five stanzas. By linking each discrete line with a stanza that began with that clicked line I was getting somewhere…. but no where near as far as I wanted. I composed yet another set of five stanzas. The linking was going quite well, but my goal for a circular poem was now just barely out of reach. One more set of five stanzas would need to be composed.

So the poem in its digital form is four times as large as the original, but clicking around on the piece indeed provides a different experience almost every time. By stretching the poem I was able to keep the echoing nature of the pantoum without relying on the entire poem being viewable and linear. I feel the echoing is more pronounced by virtue of the fact that the additional stanzas give the individual lines more “room” to reverberate as the viewer clicks through stanza upon stanza and reads each line again and again, shaped differently.
While I contemplated other linking that took the poem outside of itself (for example, I was thinking of linking the sea anemone drawing on the first page to a description of the sea anemone, pointing out the sea anemone is poisonous to many animals), but in the end decided to leave it simply the poem…. And this poetics statement. Simple. Clean. That’s what I was going for.

 

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