Sunday, March 1, 2020

dear e.e. By Iori Janes and Ingrid Akerson is an interesting interactive poem. The poem starts with a few lines about having a dream, then becomes a swirling mass of different furniture and appliances. If you hover over the certain objects then some text will pop up about that object. This is to represent an apartment the author is dreaming about mentioned in the opening lines of the poem: “Dear e.e. I dreamed that you snuck into my apartment (even though I didn’t have one) to rearrange at all.” The theme of dreams versus reality is apparent in later parts of the work as well. To escape the swirling mess you have to click a button that says “wake up.” Once you click the button there are two paragraphs about the authors. The reader would assume that they are now awake, however, the first paragraph about Iori Janes seems to be incredibly unrealistic. It says that she lives with many different animals and what her aspirations are. This is juxtaposed by the other paragraph that simply says “Ingrid Akerson just hopes to find two matching socks in the morning.” This passage compared to the other one is much more down to earth and realistic. I think this is to show the difference between what people dream of being and what people are. This interactive poem shares some similarities to because i love you)last night by E.E. Cummings. This is not too surprising considering the interactive poem is called dear e.e. However, one thing that stands out in Cummings work is the strange punctuation, especially his use of parentheses. Typically, parentheses are used in pairs to enclose sentences, however, Cummings uses them in seeming random places without another parenthesis. Both poems are strange and subvert what most people would expect from poetry.

1 comment:

  1. I thought it was interesting how you mentioned the punctuation in the interactive poem. I did not notice how the parentheses were placed in random areas.

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