Hypertext Poetry

Are all poems that are online hypertext poems? Or does there have the hyperlinks in the poem to be hypertext poems?

• A classic hypertext poem True North by Stephanie Strickland on Eastgate.
• Online sound poetry by Christian Bok.
• A great resource for contemporary poetry, which included hypertext poetry, UbuWeb.
• Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird

Computer Poetry is a related genre to hypertext poetry, which perhaps overlaps with poetry video games. In the article, Computer Poetry Pushes The Genre Envelope,Science Daily reports on the research of Maria Engberg.

The way digital poetry experiments with language raises questions and challenges conceptions of literature that were formed by printed books,” says Maria Engberg, who has examined what this entails for literary scholarship.

She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement, and word and image constructions. The poems were written, or rather created, with the help of computer technology and published on the Internet or CDs, for instance.

Some of the works can be experienced as three-dimensional installations, created in space using so-called vr-cubes and augmented-reality environments. Maria Engberg examines how the forms of the poems construct different reader roles that challenge traditional views of poetry and reading, formed by the visual conventions of the printed page.

“Reading becomes one way to use the poem, and the reader becomes an active co-player. But the poems can also eliminate that possibility, leaving the reader to be a viewer looking at the digital poem, which, like a poetic film, blends words, images, sounds, and movements into a whole,” she explains.

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