“Born Digital” Stephanie Strickland.
Electronic poetry is not print poetry accessed through an electronic medium, such as an online literary journal or an ebook. Stephanie Strickland, in her essay “Born Digital,” gives a list of eleven traits of e-poetry that distinguish it from other forms of poetry. Some of the attributes she lists give only a vague idea of what differentiates e-poetry and e-lit from other forms, such as number four: “E-poetry is a poetry requiring new reading skills.” While others are arguments of person values and perceptions, such as number three: “E-lit is the mode of literature appropriate to new social conditions.” However, some of the attributes she describes are concrete and quantifiable,
such as number one and ten: “E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it,” and “In print poetry the interface (reading surface) and the storage surface are one and the same; in e-lit they are not.” In the end, Strickland builds a cohesive set of tests for one to use in order to categorize a piece as e-poetry.
Equally as valuable as her work defining e-poetry are the plethora of examples she gives to support her assertions. A person ignorant of all aspects of e-poetry would be hard pressed to find a better sampling of e-poetry to showcase the potential of the genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment