Chapter 5 plus Other Stuff

Chapter 5 was about Kinetic and Interactive poetry. This can be explained as poetry that manipulates time and motion. Kinetic poetry is also represented in the three types of concrete poetry that the digital medium incorporates according to Rettberg: Visual, phonetic and Kinetic. In my opinion, some interactive poems are annoying and "dear e.e" was a good example of a kind of kinetic poetry that I would not read. For that poem specifically, I find the visuals being incorporated with movement and sound is more distracting to the actual poem. I also had to figure out how to get everything to display text, and when I had got it straight, I forgot what I was reading/had read. I had never read that specific poem by E.E Cummings, so I chose to read the version by Lori Janis and Ingrid Ankerson first. To this extent, I found it hard to put together the poem and I had less of a visual in my head than when I read the original version.

The interactive medium that I found the most interesting was Twine. It is a software that creates text-based games that are fun to map out. It works well for creating Choose-Your-Own-Ending stories. For the Twine game that my group made, we decided to create a battle scene where the reader can choose which side to be on between Flies and Venus Fly Traps. In creating this game, we could have made it so that each side had a chance at winning and would branch off on their own, but we ultimately decided that the Fly Traps should win no matter what. We created a map where if the viewer chose the Flies, they had an opportunity to completely lose or to get out alive but still lose. If the viewer chose the Fly Traps, they automatically win. The viewer chooses a side and then is able to switch between stats for each side before they continue with their choice. The potential for Twine is immense as the stories can go so many unique ways. This could be a medium where the reader makes their own poetry by selecting bits that build up to create their poem.

-J!ll!an