Poetry in the Hypertext Era
The essential element, if a work is to be classified as poetic or fictional in the Aristotelian scheme, is imitation (Wilson, p.5). Aristotle distinguished three manners of poetic imitation:
- One can speak invariably in one's own person.
- One can use actors to imitate the whole thing as though they were living it themselves.
- One can imitate partly by narration and partly by dramatic dialogue (as Homer does) (Potts).
We can now add a fourth manner of poetic imitation: through the use of hypertext. Poetic imitation using multimedia through the World Wide Web combines all three of Aristotle’s manners of poetic imitation.
Poetry has the widest possibilities in the Internet environment. Poetry has always had its experimental, bohemian side. To play with words is the essence of poetry. In the 1950s, there was concrete poetry (shaped, pattern, Cubist poetry). Shaped poetry can be traced to classical Greek times and was adopted in the 1950s as a new style by poets like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
During the 1960s, concrete poets like Charles Olson, with his scribbled poems that go in circles, and Susan Howe, with her cut lines glued upside down and backwards, created early attempts at unstable texts, which the Internet now incorporates. Alongside experimental poetry, Objectivist poets such as George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and Lorine Niedecker, as well as Beat poets including Allen Ginsberg and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), are now being explored and experimented with on the World Wide Web canvas.
What the World Wide Web does for poetry is to make reading an experience. Reading becomes a performance, engaging both creator and witness. Millions of poets, past and present, share their work online, hoping to connect with a global audience.
In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth wrote: "My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men..."
Today’s language of women and men is surely the language of hypertext, linking narratives from node to node. Language is ever-changing—expressions and meanings evolve (Spender, p.9). Narrative is now reader-driven.
The Internet transforms literature, with both positive and challenging aspects. On the positive side, anyone can publish their writing at any time. However, the sheer volume of content on the Web makes it difficult to stand out. There’s also the challenge of verifying the creator’s identity and protecting against plagiarism, as copying text is easy. Monetizing online content is another hurdle—few will pay to read poetry or stories unless the author is already well-known.
In printed literature, readers could deeply identify with the text, as seen with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, where readers felt they were Werther, sometimes with tragic consequences (Koestler, p.345). How does this identification translate to characters within web pages?
Point of view selects and shapes the meanings of texts. It encompasses the style and structure of the telling, the perspective from which things are seen, and the assumptions and values that pervade the text (Reid, p.12). Hypertext’s greatest value lies in reshaping the textual landscape of narrative as it has been presented in the past.
The danger of hypertext literature is having too many links, leading to incoherency. Susan Howe describes her process: “First I would type some lines. Then cut them apart. Paste one on top of another, move them around until they looked right. Then I’d xerox that version, getting several copies, and then cut and paste again until I had it right...” (Keller, p.5). This mirrors how some overload web pages with content, making them as incoherent as Howe’s poems.