PowerPoint with a side of Insight

Well then, it seems e-poetry can really give you a visual of your own mental state. This is a pretty intriguing concept, and one I’ll have to experiment with in my writing in the future.

For this week, I wrote a poem called Inferno. The underlying theme for Inferno isn’t some deep, complex mystery (I’d like to claim that I’m so brilliant with English and computer skills that I could have written a rival for Homer’s Odyssey on my first shot but sadly this is not the case)- it references a struggle with rage and hatred that I have had to deal with for years due to a certain individual’s betrayal of my entire family, which altered our lives in ways we could never have imagined possible. I hated this person for what they did and still do to an extent- even though I have always been against having such feelings about anyone and I know it’s wrong (personal conviction, not admittance to some social taboo) , it has just been unavoidable for me. The thing of it was that it wasn’t an explosion that never died down, as with a sun; instead, it crept in slowly, affecting my mental processes like an evening mist, and continued to sink its way in until I finally realized that I was carrying a giant ball of hatred within me.

I convey these ideas in the poem through the positioning and font of the text on each page. Starting with the title page, “Inferno” is written in all lower-case letters and in a small font but bolded, meaning that such a disastrous mindset can spark below one’s notice.

With the other pages, I wanted dearly to make the text do some special stuff- I saw a lot of really cool effects in class that I wanted to duplicate that would have given my poem a special edge and bring out the pain and rage I’ve felt over the course of the last few years. Unfortunately, I am not skilled with PowePoint in any way, and therefore spent a lot of time looking for text manipulation options that I simply could not find. In the end, I had to settle for simple manipulation of transitions and line textures/positions much as I did with the title page, which I personally consider to be boring in the face of all the opportunities I know I’m missing out on but in the end didn’t turn out too badly.

For the first actual page, I put the first two lines in small fonts to illustrate the silent debut of the inferno, with the first being in the elegant Blackadder font (the only fancy font I could still read accurately) for its ghostly entry. I followed this up with a relatively huge line, which strongly enforces the ideal that was sometimes the only fact I was able to hang on to- that I hated the inferno’s existence. The conclusion of slide one describes a forest (my cheerful disposition toward life) being slowly destroyed and parts of my heart being lost.

Slide two starts off with my belief that what one invests their time in carries a bit of their heart in it by having the first line “carry” the second one, which trails behind it. Simple color combination illustrates the inferno and I melding into one and the end lines that describe my frustration with myself only worsening the problem, highlighted by the middle line that basically screams at the reader.

The final slide in my opinion lacks a bit in creativity but was the best I could come up with given the content. In this slide I acknowledge that the inferno will one day die, which is why there is a change in the background- a dead fire and the destruction it leaves in its wake doesn’t necessitate a blindingly bright backdrop. Using color changes with the text, I make the transition from the fire’s death to the salvage and regrowth of whatever of my heart was destroyed in the fire and giving new life to the forest that was lost to it.

I’ve had some previous experience with the PowerPoint program, so creating this slideshow wasn’t an impossible task for me, but my inability to access the deeper functions that are supposed to be there stifled my creativity. I wanted to, as I’ve said, do some tricky stuff with the text, like have the lettering of “wasting ticks” do something resembling time ticking by, that may have added to the poem’s message. Having said that, my experience with PowerPoint was otherwise fairly positive. I was able to figure out all the key functions intuitively- and even picked up a few new ones- with no help and with fading transitions, in my opinion, illustrate the rage and hatred I felt accurately.

- His Imperial Excellency Actorbass33 the Triumphant

In the beginning there was a post...

My initial response to e-poetry based on the pieces assigned so far is that it's a really interesting concept. Before coming to this course I actually had no clue that the world of electronic literature- and by extension e-poetry- had such a huge and firmly-established thing going, and being disillusioned as to the complexity of this new world is a fun experience.

While intriguing in many ways, what draws me to e-poetry more than anything at this juncture is the infinite number of ways in which an artist can convey meaning in their e-poem. I have always enjoyed reading into the deeper meaning of what appears before my eyes or enters my ears, be it interpreting the written word, deciphering a work of visual art, or trying to find the underlying emotions in a symphony. The intellectual stimulation provided by an e-poem is like wrapping all three of these media in one awesome package- now not only am I decoding this aspect or that, but also figuring out how it ties in with the rest of the work as without a vision of the bigger picture one can’t really understand the poem’s individual aspects properly.

My favorite example of this sort of tie thus far has been The Mermaid by William Yeats. The text of the poem tells the tale of a mermaid who has caught sight of a young human man whom she was instantly attracted to and tried to pull him underwater to be with her, but in the heat of the moment failed to consider that he would drown if he did so. The message that the text conveys is that love is blind on multiple levels, and not all are in a good way (as evidencedby her unthinkingly and selfishly dragging the human underwater for herself), but the electronic presentation takes it a few steps further by presenting the first line of the poem solidly, and the rest of the poem in several blocks of text in various arrangements, all too sall to be read unless you move your mouse over them, and even then they are jittery and almost illegible. I’m not sure how accurate my take on this is (that the fuzzy/”drowned” arrangements of the text signifies that what makes sense in the heat of passion and lust is not necessarily right) but the fun thing is that there are so many interpretations possible with it that it almost doesn’t matter. The exploration of its meanings can just be fun, rather than trying to arrive at a certain answer.

More to come. Viva la literary revolution.

- His Imperial Excellency Actorbass33 the Triumphant