[Reader-list] Fwd: [ZESTPoets] Re: Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities [Fwd]

[Shivam Vij]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: M Suri <mnmsuri at sbcglobal.net>
Date: Apr 26, 2005 1:54 AM
Subject: [ZESTPoets] Re: Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry
Communities [Fwd]
To: ZESTPoets at yahoogroups.com




Sometimes, it's best that one procrastinates and never shakes one's
self of that sweet yet nagging self-indulgence of inaction.  Then one
can spare one's self and the world of one's inanities or overblown,
hypertectual meanderings.

"Hypertext poetry"?  Unless one has seeded the internet with one's own
works and then used them to compose a poem (or any other literary
work, for that matter) one is plagiarising on  a massive scale.  This
is not poetry.  The effort of allowing one's mind, as a creator or a
reader, to travel in the fluidity of hypertext may be poetic but to
call the result a work of (original) poetry is, in my humble opinion,
sheer balderdash. It is web-surfing and that act may or may not be
poetic in its execution but the result is not poetry. All the
verbosity and pseudo-intellectual blather in the world will not
salvage this canard.

Redefining an art form in one's own vision of it is not a new
exercise.  But naming it "hypertext poetry," particularly, in the
absence of any examples goes beyond the pale.  I'm all for
experimentation but "hypertext poetry" is an exercise in fulitlity
taken to the extreme.  I suspect someone went strolling among the
trees and lost sight of the forest and its constraints.

Poetry is a medium which is not limited to the page. Its origins were
in the oral tradition.  A poem was recited. It could be short or even
an epic.  Regardless of its length it was a means of communicating
that made sense to the poet and the auditors. It increasingly became
incomprehensible to newer audiences who had lost touch with the
allegorical references or were too intellectually lazy to make an
effort to understand the poet and his poem, especially, when the
alternative modes of entertainment provided more facile comprehension
and enjoyment.

Poems could also be created by the collective input of several poets.
However, to conceive of a poem as an exercise in the realm of
hypertext is to launch into space without a particular destination in
mind, ultimately, to be lost in oblivion.  Try reading to an audience
a poem created in hypertext at a poetry venue.  If you want to write
the Iliad or the Mahabharat, that's one thing but pray do not drag us
through hypertext to do it.  Poetry is straining to keep a hold on its
rapidly dimninishing audience, as it is.  I sincerely doubt that it
will retain, much less gain, an audience when one needs to explain its
new form with a treatise such as has been presented.

Enough said.

Mani Suri

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