- An
Introduction to Hyperpoetry
-
-
by Edward Picot
|
Edward Picot creates and publishes hyperliterature
and criticism on the World Wide Web. In 1997 the
Liverpool University Press published "Outcasts from
Eden", a book of literary criticism about landscape
poetry and the environmental crisis.
His
most recently-completed full-scale project is a new media
adaptation of Wallace Stevens' famous poem Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird."
http://www.edwardpicot.com/thirteenways/ |
 |
My most recent hyperpoem is something called "blowglow",
although the only purpose of this title is to help me find the
file on my computer. I probably won't use it when I publish the
piece. At first sight the poem consists of nothing more than an
empty black square, 200 pixels each way: but when you point to
it with your mouse, the word "BLOW" appears, first in cherry
red, then brightening to yellow, accompanied by the sound of
someone blowing. After a couple of seconds the word fades out
again. Point to the square a second time, and the word "GLOW"
appears, brightening and fading in the same way. Point a third
time, and you're back to "BLOW". Hopefully this will remind
people of the way in which a seemingly-dead fire brightens into
life if you blow on it, or if the wind stirs it.
This is a very simple piece by comparison with a lot of other
hyperpoetry, but now that I come to think about it, it probably
still involves quite a lot of techniques which would bamboozle
someone who didn't know anything about computers. It was made
using a piece of software called Flash, but I recorded the sound
using another piece of software called Goldwave. Once it was
recorded, I had to import the audio file into Flash, create the
animation with the words glowing into life and fading out again,
and rig up this animation so that it only ran if someone's mouse
was pointing at the black square.
On the other hand you can achieve a similar effect much more
simply, using nothing but HTML. For those who really don't know
much about computers, HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language, the
markup with which web pages are created. At its simplest it
consists of a number of tags which tell your computer how to
display the text on a web page. For example, if I wrote "Hallo!"
in a web page and marked it up like this - "<h1>Hallo!</h1>" -
your computer, when it opened the page, would display "Hallo!"
in big black letters, because <h1></h1> is the markup for a big
black heading. If I wrote "<h2>Hallo!</h2>" the heading would be
a bit smaller, "<h3>Hallo!</h3>" would be a bit smaller still,
and "<p>Hallo!</p>" would be an ordinary paragraph.
You can learn the basics of HTML in an afternoon, and you can
pick up some neat tricks pretty quickly too. One of these is how
to make words to change colour when the mouse is pointed at
them. And whereas in traditional printing the background colour
on which text is shown is almost always white - the colour of
ordinary paper - and it gets very expensive if you want anything
else, in HTML you can have any background colour you like, and
it doesn't cost anything. You can have the text any colour you
like too. What this means is that if you set your background
colour to black, and set your text to black as well, then your
text will be invisible; but if you set your text to turn from
black to red when someone's mouse points to it, it will suddenly
become visible, as if by magic, when your reader or viewer
points to the right place.
There's no point in pretending that this kind of visual poetry
is going to be for you if you're averse to computers. If you
almost never use the Internet, you're still doing most of your
correspondence in the form of handwritten letters and you'd
rather type out your poems on a manual typewriter than a PC,
then hyperpoetry is unlikely to be your bag. On the other hand,
you certainly don't have to be a computer programmer to produce
interesting work. There is an artist called Chris Ashley who
produces geometric abstract pictures using nothing but HTML
(http://chrisashley.net/weblog/), and a poet called David
Daniels who produces concrete poetry using Microsoft Word
(http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/). My own experience, not
only with hyperpoetry but with computer technology in general,
is that there's no point trying to learn everything before you
start: you learn enough to get going - in my case it was how to
create a web page - and then start to experiment. You'll soon
find that you pick up a surprising amount of new skills, bits of
software and bits of hardware bit-by-bit as you go along.
Hyperpoetry - which is otherwise known as digital poetry or
cyberpoetry - can be deterring to your readers if you overdo the
technology, so that they're not sure what to click or where to
point or how to navigate their way through a piece; or it can be
distracting and annoying if you use technology inappropriately,
so that it interferes with the meaning of your writing rather
than augmenting it; but if you use it in the right way, it can
create a very exciting and involving experience. And the fact is
that we're likely to see more and more of this kind of writing
from now on, because more and more new writing is now being
published on the Web rather than on paper, and it's being
created using software (such as Microsoft Word) which allows you
to do all sorts of interesting new things, like adding images or
sounds to your page. Under these circumstances people are bound
to experiment, and the experiments are bound to affect the
development of our literature in the course of the next few
decades.
To a large extent the kind of hyperpoetry I have been describing
is really nothing new. Concrete poetry - otherwise known as
"pattern poetry" or "shape poetry" - that is to say, poetry in
which the typographical arrangement of the words conveys an
important part of the poem's meaning - has been around for a
long time: George Herbert's poem "Easter-Wings", in which the
words are arranged into wing-shapes, is one example; another is
the Mouse's tale from Lewis Carroll's Alice through the
Looking-Glass, which is arranged into the shape of a mouse's
tail. Hyperpoetry incorporates new elements which are
unavailable in print - sound, interactivity and moving text, for
example - but nevertheless it is heavily influenced by the
concrete poetry tradition.
Also, I wouldn't want to claim that hyperpoetry is any better
than traditional poetry, and I certainly don't believe that it's
going to take traditional poetry's place, any more than films
have taken the place of books or electric guitars have taken the
place of violins. New forms of technology may make new forms of
artistic expression possible, but by and large they don't render
the older forms obsolete.
As I said before, the reason why hyperpoetry seems likely to
become increasingly popular in the next few years is because so
many poets are now creating their poetry on computers rather
than on paper, and publishing them on the Web rather than in
books. Their medium now is often the computer screen rather than
the printed page, and they are beginning to explore the
possibilities which are inherent in this new medium. But there's
another aspect of hyperpoetry which is worth mentioning. Because
it can't be reproduced in print form, it is usually published on
the Web: and although there are various online magazines (or e-zines)
which carry this kind of work, and various other places (such as
exhibitions) in which it can be shown, the norm is for it to be
self-published by its authors: which means is that if you write
hyperpoetry, or any other form of hyperliterature, then the most
natural way of publishing it is to set up your own website and
put it online yourself.
Self-publication has been a part of the poetry scene for a long
time, and it has certainly played an important role in amateur
poetry since the arrival of plain-paper photocopiers in our
places of work during the 1970s. Nevertheless, access to large
audiences has remained in the hands of the commercial publishing
companies, because they can afford to print and distribute books
of poetry nationally or even internationally, whereas
self-publishers cannot. But the Web represents a new and
virtually free method, not only of publication but of
distribution and self-publicity. If you publish on the Web, and
post notices about your work on-line in forums and noticeboards
- I now work from a list of about forty - you can build up a
sizeable audience without ever having to go through the
traditional submissions procedure. My website now gets 10,000 -
12,000 visits per month. This is a tiny number compared to an
organisation like Amazon, and it certainly doesn't mean that I'm
making lots of money, but it's very satisfying to know that
there are people out there, from all over the world, who are
taking an interest in what I do.
Doesn't this mean that anyone can self-publish on the Web,
whether their work is any good or not? Well, yes, it does: but I
think it's very difficult for people whose work really doesn't
have any merit to build up any kind of an audience for it; and I
also don't believe that the commercial publishing system has
proved itself to be a very good mechanism for sorting the wheat
from the chaff, in terms of writing quality. The old myth that
if you're any good you'll find a publisher sooner or later is
precisely that - a myth. On the contrary, as time goes by the
publishing industry seems to be more and more averse to unknown
writers and more and more enthralled by celebrity, which means
in effect that you can get anything printed once you've been on
the telly, but it's always going to be an uphill struggle
otherwise.
The publishing industry - and, as a result, our literary culture
- has become increasingly commercialised since the second world
war; but all that is changing now, thanks to the Web. The
digital environment has its bad points as well as its good, but
it does have the potential to put literature back where it
belongs, in the hands of writers and their readers. From the
cultural point of view, I think we're living in very exciting
times.