Kinetic and Interactive Poetry - Gwen W

     This week's chapter was one of my favorites. I'm a big poetry fan and digital poetry is such an amazing genre of it's own. It seemed fitting that Chris Funkhouser describes it as a conglomeration of forms. It truly is impressive how diverse and malleable this sector of e-lit is, it can be used in so many different ways and portrayed in endless ways. I really enjoy the blending of music, poetry, sound, and animation in this genre of digital literature, and the way in which interactive and kinetic poetry are now translating over into virtual and augmented reality is really neat. The flexibility of this genre creates space for a vast span of creations and the potential for poetry to grow more than ever before with the partnership with technology. The end of this chapter discussed the concept of letters as objects, in constant movement, connecting through the form of poetry. I really enjoyed the thought that kinetic and interactive poetry lets readers experience this ideation first hand through the cohesion of the several aspects of poetry. 

    This week, I really liked looking at Ingrid Ankerson's Cruising. This is such a neat poem that holds so much metaphor. The concept of love and trying to find it in this fast-paced world, as someone in the backseat, the idea of a car you can't yet take to the world. I thought this was an interesting metaphor for being young and not quite knowing how to "drive," or interact romantically with one another. The way that the poem moves so fast on the screen once you open it forces the reader to try and learn how to slow it down, speed it up, make it larger or smaller. This experience as a novice is similar to the feeling of learning to drive, or figuring out how to be romantic and interact with partners. The last line, the car you couldn't yet take to the world, really drove home the concept of being young and not having confidence in your skills just yet, not being ready to take that leap to dating or being intimate. This was a super cool form of kinetic/interactive poetry that carried a lot of metaphorical concepts, as well.