The Poetics of Kinetics

Dynamic digital environments provide new meaning to poetic works using textual kinetics. Textual kinetics is influential because the movement of text is evocative in poetry. The idea of textual movement had its poetic origins before the rise of digital technologies, within the philosophies of Futurism in the 1920’s. The Futurists were interested in representing movement on a static plane of expression. Futurist artist would use different typographical designs to evoke a sense of movement within a static medium. The rise of digital media enabled new techniques to evoke movement in poetry, such as the movement of the text itself on the screen. Textual movement on the screen can be broken down between two major design choices: whether the text moves as a result of the reader’s intervention, or the text can move without any intervention from the reader. How the text moves can be further broken down into whether the text moves within the space of a single screen, or moves from one screen to the next. Text that moves independently of any intervention by a reader can be an evocative technique to use in digital poetry, because of the limitations that this transient text enforces on the reading of that poetry. Transient text, text that moves without the reader’s intervention, has the potential to move too quickly for a reader to read. Text that moves and disappears independent of the reader’s action can take away from the contemplative experience that readers would usually expect from traditional narrative or poetic texts. Digital poems that employ textual kinetics that do not rely on the reader’s intervention look to subvert or disrupt the traditional reading experience. The significance of textual kinetics in digital poetry is shown in the poem “So, So Soulful.”

“So, So Soulful” is a stream of consciousness poem, that follows the thoughts of a character having a discussion with their boyfriend. The poem is presented in the way typical of other YHCHI poems with the text appearing and disappearing within a single screen without any intervention from the reader. The reader is unable to pause or rewind the flow of text at all, the reader relinquishes control as soon as the poem starts. The lack of reader agency in reading the text makes the textual kinetics significant in how “So, So Soulful” is read. The effect of textual kinetics is also shown in the time that the text is left up on screen for the reader to read. The pace of the poem is controlled by the text speed and the underlying music, and the pace varies according to what is happening in the poem at the time. This variance is seen between the protagonist’s thoughts and descriptions that are related to Kenji, and the protagonists more contemplative thoughts, such as when they begin to daydream about the ideal of a fake travel holiday. The text that relate to the exterior experience flash up and by quickly, showing how the protagonist (and the reader) is struggling to keep up. In contrast, the protagonists interior experience slows down the speed of the text, providing a more contemplative reading experience. The use of textual kinetics is significant in “So, So Soulful” because textual movement evokes the themes of the poem in a way that static text is unable to.