Why you will love E-Poetry

“We can learn advanced literacy. Learning how to read and write on the page is no longer enough, we need to learn how to write on these spaces, these computers. So, we learn about digital media, we learn about writing and producing text that incorporate different modes: video, audio, images. We learn about textual behaviour, and we learn code: we learn code literacy. Code is what is what makes language go in these spaces. So, I urge you to discover electronic literature. … Learn the native digital poetry, and the native literature that emerges in these spaces.”

– Leonardo Flores “I Love E-Poetry: Discovering Digital Media Poetry” (2016)

“I Love E-Poetry” is a TedX presentation by Leonardo Flores, the creator of the “I Love E-Poetry” blog. The blog analysed one e-poem a day for 500 consecutive days. Flores created this blog to attempt to broaden the audience for e-literature and promote digital literacy. He was concerned with digital literature creating new ways of reading, people had to learn how to read them: a new medium requires a new kind of literacy. The blog attempted to achieve this by providing poetic, technological, and theoretical contexts for the e-poems, along with close readings of the poems themselves. The blog became an encyclopedic resource of e-poetry, providing analysis of 500 works spanning 31 years, 100 different technologies, and 20 genres. Flores’ TedX talk used this blog as the basis for his argument that e-poetry can do things that poetry on the page cannot do.

Flores highlights the differences between print and digital textuality. A print text can be described by what it says (the sound, sequence and meaning of the words), and what it looks like (the font, formatting and visual information of the words). Digital texts can be described in the same way, but they can also be described by what they do and in what context. In other words, digital text can be described by how the text behaves. Another difference is that in a print text what you see is what you get, while a digital text has underlying code that enables an extra layer of analysis into why a text behaves the way it does. Textual behaviour is a unique characteristic of digital texts compared with print texts. Print texts are static: once you put pen to paper the text will stay that way. Digital texts can be static, but they can also be kinetic, scheduled, responsive, mutable, and aural. Digital text has this advantage over print texts, in that text on the screen has the potential to do things that text on the page cannot do.

The benefits of digital literature are not constrained to digital writers. There are benefits for people knowing how to read digital literature. Digital literature is a new form of literature, it is a form that people can adapt and use once they learn the advantages of a digital form. New readers to digital literature can also trace how literary traditions have evolved into digital media. Digital readers would not only trace literary traditions, they would be able to recognise and discover new literary genres that are created in digital media. Digital media requires the learning of a new advanced literacy, one that can involve many types of digital technologies and genres, often within a single digital text. This new literacy is already embraced by the denizens of the internet. The creation and sharing of memes (text written over a picture, rather than a blank page) is an example of digital literature. Memes are the testing ground for this new literacy, where readers are beginning to discover and learn the native literature that emerges in a digital space. Digital literacy is important for people to realise how to change how words and texts are read.