From The Thirteenth Annual Symposium on Small Computers in the Arts: Program and
Proceedings (1993)
copyright (c) 1993 by Robert Kendall
In music, video, and the visual arts, computers are opening new doors, which many artists
working in these media have been quick to enter. The role of the computer in literature
has been comparatively small, though. Granted, most writers either use a word processor or
wish they had one. But in this capacity the computer functions merely as a glorified
typewriter and has a very limited effect on the nature of the writing itself. The personal
computer has the potential, however, to take literature in some entirely new directions.
For several years, now, I have been using an IBM-compatible PC rather than the printed
page as the medium for presenting much of my poetry. This work, which I've dubbed
SoftPoetry, presents the text on the screen of the PC with the aid of animation and
graphical effects. The graphics are accompanied by a musical sound track, and menus pop up
along the way to give the viewer some control over the direction of the poetry.
The Birth of SoftPoetry
I was drawn to computer-based poetry in an effort to combine the benefits of the two
traditional methods of presenting poetry to the world--publishing it in books and
magazines and reading it aloud to an audience. I frequently give poetry readings, and I've
always found the direct connection with an audience very stimulating and exciting. When
read aloud, a poem comes alive in a way it can't upon the printed page.
There's something lost as well, though. Since the listener can't see the printed words,
many textual subtleties just don't come across. Obviously the ear can't pick up unusual
spellings and punctuation or interesting layouts, and it can have trouble with coined
words, puns, double meanings, and other word play.
Because of this, I found some of my poems not really suitable for reading aloud. I
wanted, however, to be able to give these poems the dynamism of live performance. I saw
the PC as a means of turning the poem into a performance similar to a poetry reading,
injecting it with that added vibrancy. Yet the poem "performed" by the computer
sacrifices none of the subtleties that come through only in the printed word, because the
printed word is still there right on the screen.
In fact, the graphical power of the computer can push the visual impact of the word
much further than it could ever go on paper. SoftPoetry builds on the 2,000-year-old
tradition of concrete poetry, or visual poetry, in which the meaning of the poem is
enhanced by its visual appearance through unusual typography and layout. Elaborate color
graphics, animation, and transition effects are now added to the visual poet's repertory.
SoftPoetry is also a video extension of the tradition of the book as art
object--calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, and illustrated books.
Another strong motivation for my SoftPoetry was the desire to extend the thematic reach
of my written poetry, which often explores images and modes of communication unique to the
information age. The icons and archetypes of mass media often find their way into my
written work. SoftPoetry reverses the process. Instead of putting the cultural icon into
the poem, it puts the poem into one of the icons central to our society--the CRT that
represents both the computer and television.
Putting poetry on the computer screen lets me explore modes of writing that capture the
essence of our techno-centric society in a way that poetry on the page could never hope to
do. Rather than merely evoking the symbols of modern life through descriptive imagery, the
SoftPoem can actually become a machine with buttons to press; it can become a neon sign;
it can become a late-night movie.
Adding music to this work seemed an inevitable step, since it brought the poetry more
squarely into the domain of the performing arts. The sound track also clinched the
association with TV and movies, the two grand myth-makers of our culture, the two great
windows onto the archetypes of our cultural subconscious. Of course, combining music and
poetry is an age old tradition that undoubtedly predates written literature. I'm merely
taking the tradition in a different direction, since the music accompanies the written
rather than the spoken or sung word. It's song without singers; opera without actors.
The Reader as Creator
The interactive element is something entirely new that the computer brings to written
literature. The printed page is inherently linear but the computer is by nature nonlinear.
Interactivity lets literature more accurately mirror the real world. Life itself is a
random-access medium, not a linear one. The human mind is a random access device, not a
linear one. Menu options and hypertext features in a computer-based poem can reflect the
myriad choices and possibilities that life presents us with.
The most immediate precursors to interactive literature are found in computer-based
entertainment--such as video games and interactive adventure stories--rather than other
traditions in the arts. But I think the urge toward audience participation in literature
is something quite timeless.
This was brought home to me most pointedly when I became a new parent and of necessity
a practitioner of literature in perhaps its purest form--the improvised bed-time story. My
3-year-old daughter continually edits my stories as they unfold. For example, should I
introduce characters who aren't to her liking, she's sure to make her teddy bear frighten
them away. I'm then forced to replace them with more acceptable protagonists.
I also began to think about how I tell a story or anecdote to friends. It's far from a
matter of merely reciting a fixed text. Not only might I be interrupted by requests for
elaboration, but other responses such as laughter, a raised eyebrow, or a yawn might
affect the details of my tale. In other words, it's an interactive process.
I believe that the instinct for interacting with a story is quite primal, stemming from
literature's origins as a purely oral medium. The interactive element was merely thwarted
when story-telling bent to the requirements of the written or printed page. Perhaps
computer-based interactivity can help recapture something that lies close to the very
heart of our innate need for stories and poems.
Interactivity plays a much more important role in my SoftPoetry in progress than in my
past work. I've created a technique I call "organic hypertext," which is central
to the structure of the poem I'm currently working on. The poem consists of different
sections that explore remembered images and scenes, with hypertext links among the
sections. The viewer can move among the sections in a nonlinear fashion, but each time he
returns to a section already read, he'll find it has changed--sometimes a little,
sometimes a lot. Many of the changes reflect what he's read elsewhere in the poem between
the first and second readings of a section.
This lets the poem mirror the way thoughts, attitudes, and memories evolve and
fluctuate over time and in the light of new experience or ideas. My aim is to create a
literature that behaves the way human thought processes do. Since the poem is different
every time it's read, it also reflects the dynamic nature of the real world. I hope that
the experience of reading the SoftPoem can perhaps even become a little like getting to
know a living, breathing person.
Nuts and Bolts
I've created my SoftPoetry with the aid of several development tools, including Visual
Basic and the multimedia presentation packages IBM Storyboard Live and Gold Disk's
Animation Works Interactive for Windows. Of course, these multimedia programs weren't
designed for creating literature or art--they're aimed primarily at business people who
want to give a presentation using the computer monitor instead of a slide projector or
corporate trainers who need to create computer-based training applications.
I suppose it's fitting that I'm using business software to create my SoftPoetry, since
some of my poetry delves into the language and imagery of Corporate America and Madison
Avenue--powers that control our lives to a frightening degree, though they are all but
ignored by most poetry.
The multimedia packages let me string together graphics images, create transition
effects between images, fashion animations, and incorporate menus for the viewer to select
from. They can also play my MIDI music compositions while the graphics are being
displayed.
Once I had initially created the work, I found myself refining it after observing how
people interacted with the poetry. For example, I observed that people might watch the
presentation for a while and then walk away before a poem had finished running, leaving a
menu on screen with no one to select from it. I then set up the display so that whenever a
menu was presented to the viewer, if no selection was made after 60 seconds, the poem
would continue on its own. Thus there is always something happening on the screen to
attract a new viewer.
The Audience
Bringing SoftPoetry to an audience poses a unique challenge, since it can't be
distributed through the traditional channels for literature. Even distributing the work
through the usual software channels poses a real problem. Few PCs are equipped with the
Roland GS-compatible MIDI hardware necessary to play back the music convincingly. With the
poems created in Storyboard Live, it's impossible to maintain synchronization between the
graphics and the music when the poem is run on a machine faster or slower than the one it
was created on.
I've come to think of the SoftPoetry display primarily as an installation--a sort of
interactive literary artwork. Some of the venues I've found for it include galleries and
museums, colleges, arts and community centers, book stores, book fairs, and literature
festivals.
However, this work is also distributed on disk in versions without music. A third
distribution means is videotape. In this form, one of my SoftPoems was aired on cable TV
and presented at a video festival. While videotape lets me retain the music, the
interactive element is completely lost and some of the quality of the graphics is
sacrificed.
The SoftPoetry installation does have one significant advantage over books, literary
magazines, and poetry readings when it comes to disseminating poetry. It lets me reach
beyond the normally very small audience attracted to contemporary poetry, which has become
the poor relation of the arts in this century. I've found that my work greatly appeals to
the general public's fascination with computer technology, as well as its interest in
anything that bears a resemblance to television. Young people are particularly drawn to
these aspects of the work.
As technology improves, distributing this type of work will become much easier. I hope
that eventually disseminating SoftPoetry on a medium such as CD-ROM will become as easy
and routine as distributing an audiocassette or a videotape today.
I also take comfort in the interactive multimedia technology for the mass market--such
as interactive TV--that is on the horizon. When the general public becomes accustomed to
interactive multimedia, I think we'll see a sudden surge of interest among artists in
interactive computer-based art forms. In fact, I believe this genre may eventually become
so popular that it will characterize the next century in the same way that film and video
in this century emerged from new technologies to create a distinctively 20th-century
medium.
I feel that I have just scratched the surface of this new medium, and I find its
seemingly endless possibilities very exciting. Already I feel it has allowed me to express
artistic ideas that would otherwise have remained mute. It has also attracted a surprising
amount of new interest to my poetry from many different quarters. Though I continue to
write and publish poetry on the page in the conventional manner and continue to give
poetry readings, more and more of my energies are going into SoftPoetry, which has now
become my primary genre.
I guess one of my dreams is that 50 or 100 years from now, lit students will call their
anthologies up on their PC screens and immerse themselves in interactive poetry and
fiction. All the technological barriers to this dream will fall away during the next few
decades. Whether or not it becomes reality will depend solely on the energies and
inspirations of writers.
