THE DIGITAL PULL OF
THE GENRE CALLED POETRY
The essence of true
poetry is that it comes from within-- a voice that is alive and roaring in the
spirit of its wilderness untamed by society. Social media often influence you
to view your work through the reader's mind by basing your success on likes and
comments. But poetry is a sincere, honest calling of the heart and it has an
infinite appeal. Culturally poetry is used in various ways and it has a power
to inspire change like no other art form.
In the past poetry
used to be an ambitious affair. Who can forget the timeless Iliad or Odyssey,
or the magnificent poetry of the Romantic poets who were not afraid to take on
larger- than- life projects. The life and works of Shelley exemplify English
Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair.
Romanticism's major themes-- restlessness and brooding, rebellion against
authority, interchange with nature, the power of visionary imagination and of
poetry, the pursuit of ideal love and the untamed spirit ever in search of
freedom -- all of these Shelley exemplified in the way he lived his life and
live on in the substantial body of work that he left the world after his legendary death by
drowning.
The digital
development of the past two decades have brought a revolution in the concept,
form and writing of poetry. Earlier poetry was written with a pen or a pencil
on paper. But these days almost every poet writes on their laptops or phones--
poetry is read and written more by the glow of smartphones than the flicker of
candlelight. Majority of the people prefer to read poetry online than buy
paperbacks or hardcover versions. I feel there is a sensual quality to print
books that e- books lack. Whenever we hold a book in our hands, we feel its
size, its weight and the quality of paper that is used. The smell of books
blesses our olfactory bulb: if I make a sweeping generalization, I can say that
books are one of the best- smelling things in the world, because they
appeal to explicit and implicit memory.
Digital poetry is
born from the combination of technology and poetry with writers using all
multi- media elements as critical text. Sounds, images, movement, video,
interface/ interactivity and words are combined to create new poetic forms and
experiences. It intends to communicate the extraordinary perception of the
ordinary. Here the potentials expand beyond form-- letters, words, phrases,
lines, line breaks, stanzas, enjambment and so on-- to incorporate colour,
reader interaction, art and a third dimension of space.
There is a growing
public interest in Insta Poetry. They are quite easy to grasp and question
established norms of poetry as a literary form and lack the complexity and
literariness of the established genre. Instagram poets, however, have been
claimed as the driving force behind the a resurgence in U S. poetry readership.
But other accounts have taken a dimmer view of this success. The world of
Instagram poets have been called a "huckster's paradise" of self-
promotion and media manipulation. These poets have been labelled as
"bad" poets because what they
write is not really poetry. Writing in the venerable British journal P. N
.Review, Rebecca Watts decries the"
open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft"
evident in the " artless poetry" of Instagram poets.
Poetry as a literary genre has undergone a
noticeable change in the 21st century-- its frontiers have been extended and so
many new dimensions have been added. Should we call it a 'renaissance'? For
staunch traditionalists digital poetry likely challenges their definitions of
what poetry should be, looking more like a maddening interactive website or
irreverent game than the spontaneous emptying of Wordsworth's soul. But
certainly, new approaches are required to analyse today's multimodal and
intermedial forms of poetry.
The page and the
printed book no longer constitute the sole focus of a poem's presentation and
reception. In many countries, the poetry slam-- poetry in its most popular
form-- fills large theaters. Culturally, poetry slams are a break with the past
image of poetry as a rigid art form. It is because poems can be performed on
the stage, spoken by professional speakers. They are available on you tubes or
other social media platforms. There is a wide range of new experimental media
poetry that employs kinetic script or natural or manipulated human voices, thus
translating visual and sound poetry into the digital realm.
Bob Dylan-- an
American musician and visual artist-- received the Noble Prize in Literature
for having created new poetic expressions with the great American song
tradition in the year 2016. It sparked a heated debate in academia and in
feature pages as well. All of us are surprised-- what counts poetry and what
does not!
In the present
scenario poets either affirm and adopt media technologies and new event
formats, or they remain in their established domain and present their work in
old exquisite language. But even such poets who continue to publish their
poetry in print are inevitably reacting to the pluralization of the genre in
one way or the other. So we can't confine ourselves to closed containers of
rigidity.
The most celebrated
genre of literature -- poetry-evolved and attained maturity through a gradual
process. In its earliest form it was oral recitation and it preceded writing.
Theological and religious scriptures like Sanskrit Vedas are basically called 'Shruti'
meaning what is heard and this sets them
apart from other texts which are called 'smriti' meaning what is remembered.
Since then it has been constantly evolving adopting new forms, techniques and
languages with a myriad of manifestations. We can compare the highly structured
and formal old style poems with modern ones that use blank verse and free verse
and are informal. I wish to conclude with these words, "... Just as words
change, idioms fall in and out of custom, and language pools shrink and grow,
so too does poetry." In this digital age the form and content of poetry
has witnessed a sea change -- a boon or a bane?
DR. RANJANA SHARAN
SINHA
From The
Editorial Desk
OPA
A
WORLDWIDE
WRITERS’ WEB
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