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The ‘screen‐size’ art: Using digital media to perform poetry
Article  in  English in Education · June 2008
DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2008.00012.x
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The ‘screen-size’ art: Using
digital media to perform
poetry
Janette Hughes
Faculty of Education, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Abstract
In this paper, I examine the immersive and performative potential of new
media for reading, writing and representing poetry to encourage an
exploration of the relationship between text, image and sound and
discuss how these are used to mediate meaning making. Based on the
premise that poetry is meant to be lifted from the printed page and
experienced in multimodal ways, the research explores the notion of
poetry as digital performance.
Keywords
Poetry, performance, multimodality, digital literacy, collaboration, play
148 ª 2008 The Author.
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Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2008.00012.x English in Education Vol.42 No.2 2008
Poetry should have a central place in all of our lives, not only for the
aesthetic pleasure it affords, but also for its ability to awaken our senses,
connect us with ourselves and others, and lead us to think in synthesising
ways, as required by its use of the language of metaphor (Peacock, 1999;
Zwicky, 2000; Hoogland, 2007). Poetry’s conciseness, its brevity, and its
power to convey so much in such a limited space are its appeal. Peacock
(1999) calls poetry ‘the screen-size art’ that provides a ‘quick dive in a deep
pool’, offering ‘depth in a moment, using the depth of a moment’ (p. 13).
Poetry encourages an economy and precision in language that transfers to
other types of oral and written communication. Michaels (1999) suggests,
‘Reading and writing poems can help us discover profound truths we didn’t
realise we knew’ (p. 3). Poetry evokes feelings and provokes thoughts
about complex social issues (Damico, 2005). Poetry is more than a vehicle
for expression; it is also a way of knowing. Poetry both requires and
facilitates a concentration of mind or sustained attention to which our hectic
lives have unaccustomed us. The linking of the strange with the familiar
through the image, or even through well-placed line breaks, is perhaps
what makes poetry so powerful. Poetry transforms the way we see the
commonplace through new and fresh perspectives.
Poetry as a school-based experience, however, seems to fall short of the
potential described above. Much has been written about the problems
associated with teaching poetry (Wade and Siddaway, 1990; Andrews,
1991; Benton, 1999, 2000; Pike, 2000). More than other genres such as
novels, non-fiction or plays, poetry seems to elicit the most complaints
from students. Often, Language Arts teachers report feeling less
comfortable teaching poetry than literature or drama, either because they
aren’t sure how to teach it effectively (owing to lack of pedagogical role
models), or because they find it elusive themselves (Lockward, 1994). The
dominant model of poetry teaching has been to teach poetry through
static words on the page, and to focus on finding one meaning to be
dissected or a content to be apprehended.
Poetry in school also persists for the most part as a print-based experience.
This stands in sharp contrast to the everyday experiences of many students
who are growing up digitally literate. The 2003 Ontario Secondary School
Literacy Test survey indicated that 97% of students have access to a
computer in their home and further, the results show that 79% of the
students were using their computers for online chat, e-mail messaging, and
accessing Internet material. Access has become even easier five years later.
However, issues of access and equity continue to be important, and perhaps
one way to begin to close the digital divide is to integrate more new media
in the classroom. New media technology facilitates the convergence of
multiple modes in one medium, which fosters the strengths of diverse
learners and promotes greater educational equity (Kinzer, Gabella and
Rieth, 1994; Wilhelm, 1995; Short, Kauffman and Kahn, 2000).
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In today’s world, literacy includes an understanding of how texts are
constructed and how a variety of forms of representation work together to
convey meaning. Kress (2003) argues that very soon the screen (whether
TV, computer, cell phone or other emerging technology) will govern all of
our communication practices and language use. Students will understand
language use within an electronic medium. In digital environments words
are no longer static, black marks on a white page. Different modes of
expression or ‘modalities’ – aural, visual, gestural, spatial and linguistic –
come together in one environment in ways that reshape the relationship
between printed word and image or sound (Jewitt, 2006). This change in
the materiality of text – that is, the media that are used to create the text –
inevitably changes the way we read or receive the text, and has important
implications for the way we construct or write our own texts.
To help our students understand and experience how literature, and
poetry in particular, brings them to a deeper understanding in life, we
need to find meaningful ways to engage them with poetry, ways that are
also part of their new media world. Towards this end, I conducted a
research study where I engaged in conversation with poets about poetry,
poetry teaching and new media.
About the study
The study is based on in-depth interviews with four prominent
contemporary Canadian poets – Cornelia Hoogland, Penn Kemp, John B.
Lee and Molly Peacock – in an attempt to explore the nature of poetry,
the teaching and learning of poetry, and the potential role of new media
in the teaching and learning process. The following questions guided my
investigation:
1. According to poets, what are the most important things to appreciate
about poetry, and how should poetry be taught?
2. How does what poets say coincide with: a) theory and research
related to poetry teaching and learning and, b) existing print and
digital resources? Do gaps exist? What are the points of convergence?
3. How might new media help us reconsider what poetry is and does in
the classroom?
My study is extensive and I cannot do justice to all of its components in
the space of this paper. I have chosen to focus on one of the themes that
emerged from the study, namely poetry as performance.
Poetry as performance
Recently, I attended Molly Peacock’s off-Broadway stage performance of
The Shimmering Verge, which included the following: some of her poetry,
music, a set, movement, and stories related to the poems. Though her
performance was more elaborate than typical poetry performances in
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poetry readings, readings are also more than just the words of a poem on
the printed page. Poets at poetry readings have a physical presence, they
read their poems aloud, they tell stories to set the stage for the poems
they read, and they answer questions from the audience. We might view
the various components of a poetry performance as annotations to the
printed poem – extensions that elaborate and add depth of meaning and
lift the poem off the printed page. These annotations adorn a poem and
are a way of making special, to use Dissanayake’s (2003) phrase.
Although none of the poets in the study authored poems using new
media, we can imagine what might happen in such a scenario. Let us
consider the digital performance of Kemp’s (2002) poem, Not Waving but
Drowning (visit http://www.mytown.ca/pennkemp/ to view the digital
performance). This digital performance was produced after the printed
poem was written, and was created not by Kemp herself, but by visual
artist Jeff Dawson, who approached the poet and asked her permission to
animate the poem. However, imagine that when Kemp had the idea of
writing this poem, she also had an interest in new media and let us
imagine that she decided to write this poem in a new media environment.
How might the poem have been written differently? Would it have been
simply a set of stanzas on the screen, mimicking the printed form?
It is possible that Kemp might have used a multimedia authoring
environment to write her poem by integrating a variety of modes of
expression. Here is one possible scenario: the poem might have been
read, with only some of the words printed on the screen; images might
have been incorporated to express the feelings that Kemp wanted to
portray; perhaps some form of music might have been added at
appropriate places in the reading of the poem; she might have also added
video clips of herself telling a few stories that relate to the poem; she
might want to share more than one version of the poem, perhaps earlier
or simply alternate versions. The question in my mind would then be,
‘where does the poem end, and where does its performance begin?’.
The point I am making is that new media, unlike the printed page, are
(much more so) performance media. Writing poetry in new media blurs
the boundary between a poem and its performance and reminds us of
poetry’s oral origins. In the example above, where I outlined a possible
alternate authoring of Kemp’s Not Waving but Drowning, it is difficult to
distinguish between what is typically considered to be poetry (the printed
poem) and what is a poetry performance, as the reading, the music, the
images, and perhaps even the stories on video, are integral components
of the authored poem.
As I conducted a content analysis (Berg, 2004) of the interviews of the
poets in the study, and as I reflected on the nature of poetry in a new
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media context, I identified six performance characteristics of new media.
New media performance is: multimodal rather than text-based; collective
rather than individual; shared rather than private; multi-interpretive rather
than a single meaning; playful rather than serious; integrated rather than
singular. I describe each of these characteristics below, and I discuss
implications for the teaching and learning of poetry. I should clarify that I
do not mean to suggest that the characteristics I identify below are
necessarily part of poetry written or studied, but rather that these
characteristics represent affordances that are introduced or enhanced due
to new media.
Multimodal rather than text-based
Although, as Kress (2000) reminds us, all texts are multimodal, the
linguistic mode often dominates (p. 187). It is my contention that poetry,
because of its use of rhythm and image in concert, is perhaps more
multimodal, in a metaphoric sense, than other genres typically explored
(and indeed privileged) in English classes. Even more than other genres,
poetry lends itself to the kinds of associative linking made concretely
possible through new media. A performance, whether it occurs on stage
or using new media, is a multimodal expression. On the stage, it involves
vocal elements (intonation, inflection, volume, tempo), costume, set
design, music, lighting, and movement (blocking or choreography). All of
these elements are also present in a new media context, as programs such
as Flash, Photostory or iMovie for example, allow for vocal as well as
visual expression.
The use of new media offers one way that poetry can be lifted from the
printed page and explored in multimodal ways. The use of new digital
media for reading, writing and representing poetry encourages an
exploration of the relationship between text and image, and how images
and sound might be used to mediate meaning making. Giving students
opportunities to create poems or respond to and annotate existing poems
using new media provides them with opportunities to use the technology
in meaningful ways. Following are two examples of how teachers with
even minimal technology skills might use new media to explore poetry:
Writing hypermedia response
Students can use HyperStudio or the hyperlinking function in PowerPoint
or Corel Presentations to create links from key words or phrases in an
existing poem or a poem that they have written. Students might create
links that take their reader/viewer to a written personal response to an
aspect of the poem, to a definition of a poetic device or convention used
in the poem, to an image that the student feels illuminates the poem in
some way, to an external link that might provide an oral reading of the
poem or biographical information about the poet, or even to a video or
audio clip that presents a dramatic performance of the poem. The use of
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new media enables the student poet to experiment with the use of
images, to provide some annotations, to add further insights, or to point
to certain things in the poem, which is something many poets do before
or after oral readings of their work. Adding visual or auditory components
to poetry opens up new ways of using language and experiencing
literature.
Creating digital poetry
Students can use PhotoStory or iMovie to create their own digital poems
or to represent an existing poem through multimedia. These two
programs are very simple to use (and are in fact widely used in Ontario
schools) and provide students with step-by-step instructions through the
creation process. Students can use scanned or downloaded images or,
even more effective, take their own photos with a digital camera. They
organise their images and use the voice-recording feature to read the
poem aloud. They can add sound effects or a soundtrack of music they
have created through the program or clips of music that come with the
program. Most significantly for the study of poetry, these new media
allow students to have oral readings linked with their print version of the
poem, an approach that honours the multimodal nature of poetry and the
students’ multiple literacies.
In my current research investigating the creative processes of students
who author poetry with new media, it is interesting to note that the
approach varies from student to student. Some students begin with a
concrete image, a photograph or a piece of artwork, and create text for
their poem around the image; others begin with the words of the poem,
develop the language and then search for visual images to use in
conjunction with their words. Some students use a combination of the
two approaches, perhaps beginning with an image that inspires words or
phrases, which in turn leads them to more visual images.
Because they are immersed in digital environments, not only on the
Internet, but also through their gaming systems, students naturally express
themselves in multimodal ways. It would not require any kind of leap for
most students to create hypermedia or digital poetry, as long as they had
the appropriate technology to do so. They already possess the necessary
cultural and cognitive tools, albeit in a nascent form.
Collective rather than individual
John B. Lee refers to the writing of poetry as a ‘solitary art’ which is
‘learned and practiced in solitude’ (Hughes, 2006). In fact, all of the poets
in the study describe their writing ‘habits’ and the necessity of carving out
time for writing. However, when Molly Peacock creates a stage
performance of her poetry, such as The Shimmering Verge, she
collaborates with others on set design and construction, on the live music
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to be used and played, and on the choreography of her movements. She
employs a director for the production and performs with a pianist on
stage. Creating such a performance is typically a collective enterprise. By
‘collective’ I want to refer not only to the human collaborators (poet,
musician, choreographer, set designer), but also to the physical and other
artifacts that inhabit the stage. Music, set, light, and movement become
tools to think with and tools that affect how a poet sees and performs her
poetry.
Levy (1997) suggests that such a collective forms a ‘cognitive ecology’ in
which ‘The system for the production and distribution of knowledge
doesn’t depend on the individual features of the human cognitive system
alone, but also on collective methods of organisation and the instruments
with which information is communicated and processed’ (p. 200). Borba
and Villareal (2005), researching students doing mathematics with new
media, suggests that different media reorganise thinking in different ways.
Borba and Villareal quote Noss and Hoyles (1996) who emphasise the
role of computers, or any tool, as mediators of knowledge. Using new
media to create poetry is not just about adding pictures to poetry or
having more ways of expressing ourselves poetically. To use Borba and
Villareal’s terms, it reorganises and restructures our thinking about poetry.
The shift from text to new media is analogous to the shift we made from
an oral culture to a print culture.
In the previous section I outlined some possible ways that students might
use new media in the reading, writing or representing of poetry by
adding visual images, sound or annotations. The various modes can be
viewed as additional layers of meaning, thereby adding to the complexity
of the poem. The student who adds visual images, sound or uses different
sizes and styles of fonts to an existing, previously printed poem, acts as
co-creator and, according to Kemp, these new versions or performances
of the poem ‘change the poem’. She equates these kinds of performances
with the act of the reader who takes on the role as co-creator.
What poets, teachers and students might do with poetry in a new media
context is an exciting aspect of my continuing research. I do believe the
affordances of new media offer opportunities to revitalise poetry in ways
that have yet to emerge, as the use of new media in poetry writing,
teaching and learning is still nascent.
Shared rather than private
Performance assumes an audience and, although poetry created using
new media is not necessarily always posted on the Internet, it is more
likely to be. Writing poetry in digital environments such as blogs places
poetry more directly on the public stage where it belongs and makes it
accessible to a wider audience.
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Although it is often perceived as the final stage in the reading or writing
process, performance or publication can also be viewed as an integral
part of the response and editing cycle. Teachers have long engaged in
informal means of ‘publishing’ their students’ work, whether it is bound in
class anthologies, fixed to classroom bulletin boards or, more recently,
posted to classroom websites. Some teachers organise poetry cafes with
their students, either in the classroom or for the school community. There
are numerous forums for the formal publication of student poetry that
range from journals or magazines and online poetry ezines. Online poetry
forums encourage students to post their work and receive feedback and
writing advice from moderators or online mentors and, finally, consider
the burgeoning number of teen blogs, as many adolescents engage in
what Lankshear and Knobel (2003) call ‘self-broadcasting’. Our students
spend more and more time in digital environments that are bound up in
social practices, and require collaboration and participation. No longer do
we just write poetry and file it away; performance is becoming the norm.
Performance, many would argue, is what is breathing new life into poetry
in contemporary society (Collins, 2004; Holman, 2004; Howard, 2004;
Jacobus, 2004; Rodriguez, 2004; Smith, 2004).
Multi-interpretive rather than a single meaning
The ‘immersive and performative potential’ of new media encourage the
reader ‘to explore or answer poems with new forms of verbal and visual
play’ (Nichols, 2002, p. 23) and offer new ways to experience poetry.
When viewing poems accompanied by images, Lee suggests that the
reader should compare her or his own idea for the images in the poem
with those provided by the creator of the digital performance because
each performance offers a new and different interpretation of the poem.
Lee uses the analogy of performing Shakespeare or any other play. Each
performance is an interpretation and offers points for comparison. Such a
view where possibilities are explored and the poem is experienced in
multiple ways, stands in sharp contrast to looking for ‘the’ meaning of a
poem.
To illuminate the idea that a reading is a performance and an
interpretation, I created a ‘digital exploration’ for the poets to consider
that examines Molly Peacock’s reading of her poem ‘That Leaf’ (2002)
(visit http://faculty.uoit.ca/hughes/Research/paint.html). In his book,
Wordplaygrounds, John O’Connor (2004) proposes that teachers guide
their students to pay attention to words that a reader might want to stress,
the speed at which the words are delivered and the spaces between those
words, and the way the reader might want to pronounce certain words
for greater effect. O’Connor calls these ‘performance tools’ and offers
exercises in ‘punching, pausing and painting’ words for oral performance.
Noting that adolescents are particularly concerned with notions of
identity, O’Connor also provides exercises that help students consider
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ways of creating or adopting various personae through performance.
Using O’Connor’s performance tools – paint, punch and pause – in the
digital poetry exploration, the reader can visually see as well as hear how
the poet uses these tools as she performs the poem. Lee reminds us that a
poem is a visual artifact and a poem’s arrangement on the page provides
the reader with direction, much the same way a musical score gives
direction to a musician. Punctuation and line-breaks offer the reader cues
as to how the poem should be read aloud. Cadences in the language also
steer an oral reading. Long words lengthen or extend the lines while
monosyllabic words do the opposite, just as repeated use of long vowels
serve to elongate words and slow the reader down, and repetition of
short vowel sounds speed the reading up. The choice of words
themselves, as well as how they are positioned in a line, helps determine
whether or not the word will be ‘punched’ (emphasised) or not. Poets
also ‘paint’ words by performing the word in a way that illustrates its
meaning. In Peacock’s reading, for example, she utters the word
‘exhausted’ with a heavy sigh. Through a close examination of this digital
exploration, the reader should begin to observe that when a poem is read
aloud, the choices the reader makes could influence the listener’s
understanding of the poem.
In the digital exploration discussed above and in a similar exploration
developed for Cornelia Hoogland’s (2004) poem ‘Normal, Blessed Normal’
(visit http://faculty.uoit.ca/hughes/Research/multiple.html), the reader can
compare the oral readings of several different people reading the
following stanza:
And in the silence that followed
The bombs fell
And the silence fell
And the screen got clear,
Really clear like she was back in the exact
Moment of the photo,
The dog with his goofy grin
Looking up at her.
Peacock points out that each of the readings is infused with the
personality of the reader, and Lee notes that the readings reinforce the
important idea that an oral reading of a poem is indeed an interpretation.
Lee is fascinated by how the choices about which words to emphasise
affect the meaning of the poem. He comments:
What’s really interesting to me is that for some of the people
the emphasis falls on the word ‘fell’ and for some of the
people it falls on the word ‘bombs’ and some of the people
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say the word ‘fell’ differently the second time ‘and in the
silence that followed/the bombs fell/and the silence fell’.
There is a subtle parenthetic difference between those two
‘fells’ – the bombs fell and the silence fell.
(see http://faculty.uoit.ca/hughes/Research/multiple.html to
hear Lee’s comments)
Although I have tried to distinguish between the two ‘fells’ as Lee reads
them by underlining the second ‘fell’, this is a poor substitute for actually
hearing his reading. It is difficult to make sense of his comments without
listening to the video clip. Interestingly, this observation offers some
insight into the importance of how hearing something read aloud helps
mediate meaning making. These two digital explorations afford the reader
an opportunity to listen to the readings, to hear the way the poem is
performed in order to consider or even discuss with others, how the
poem was rendered and how each reading promotes or detracts from his
or her own hearing and understanding of the poem. Such explorations
prompt the reader to consider how poetry is read aloud and to make
connections between the poem as it appears on the page (with its linebreaks,
rhyme scheme, punctuation and enjambment) and the way it is
performed through a person’s voice.
Hearing a poem being read aloud reminds us of poetry’s roots in the
spoken word and providing opportunities for students to record their
own oral readings of poems and to compare these with other readings
engages them with the text through a performance which represents their
interpretation and response to the poem. The kind of performance made
possible through new media allows students to infuse their own
understanding of and response to the poem into their performance and to
compare those oral readings with others. In this approach, sound is
meaning and plays a significant role in cognition. Experiencing poetry in
multimodal ways adds layers of meaning and interpretation that might not
be conveyed in a strictly print format.
Playful rather than serious
Play takes various forms, but pleasure is at the heart of all play. In the
context of this paper, play refers to fun as well as to semantics and the
idea of word play, and the notion of experimentation with new forms of
expression. A poem and its performance can have a playful feel;
however, new media extends how one might be playful with a poem. For
example, a digital poem is more easily malleable. Unlike a poem in print,
with its words fastened securely to their respective positions on the page,
a digital poem’s line breaks, indentation, use of white space and other
physical features can be easily altered on the screen. This offers poets and
students opportunities to explore different structures and consider their
effects. In my discussions with the poets in the study, I introduced digital
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explorations based on suggestions or comments that they made. Molly
Peacock noted that a poem might be understood in part by looking at its
nouns or its verbs. Taking Peacock’s poem That Leaf (1989), I created a
digital exploration where the user can choose to see only the verbs or
only the nouns or only the verbs and nouns. Such an exploration allows
for interesting readings of the poem and invites the reader to fill the gaps
in their own ways. Hoogland suggested that one might consider changing
the colour of the ‘yellow Jello’ that she used in her poem Normal, Blessed
Normal (2004). I consequently created an exploration where the user can
change the colour of the Jello that she chose to use in one of her stanzas,
and also depicted an image of a bowl of Jello changing colour (visit
http://faculty.uoit.ca/hughes/Research/jello.html). In an interview with
Hoogland, the poet discusses disjunction, the leap from one semantic,
discursive, or figurative plane to another. Hoogland points out that ‘poetry
is disjunctive in the sense that it is always moving, always unpredictable,
shifting, it dislocates its meanings, it sets up a trope and challenges it, and
alludes to its own meanings’. In Hoogland’s poem, a sudden shift occurs
that serves to juxtapose the unremarkable experience of a woman
drinking coffee in a cafe´ with friends, to an image of exploding Jello as
bombs begin to fall around them. In discussing the place of Jello in a war
poem, Hoogland remarks, ‘I needed the Jello badly because everything
was so tense and awful and foreboding, I just needed to get out of there.
I needed to break out. I needed to laugh and Jello was the way to do it.’
In her final comments about yellow Jello, Hoogland suggests that it would
be interesting to see what effect would be created if a different colour of
Jello was used.
All of the poets responded first to the playfulness of the exploration with
expressions of delight such as ‘what fun!’. Lee elaborates on how the
exploration works for him:
You’re reminded of the meaning being both in the actual
implication and dictionary denotative meaning of the word
but also in the difference of how it sounds and this forces
you to think about it as a colour. The word yellow, it keeps
coming back to me that yellow is right because of what it
sounds like, not only because of what it looks like or the
image that you conjure up as a result of it. Everything else
seems so entirely wrong and instantly wrong.
For Lee, the effectiveness of the exploration lies in the combination of the
words with the image as they work together to offer insight regarding the
appropriateness of the poet’s choice. The new media treatment of this
stanza in the poem offers a new performance of that part of the poem,
giving the reader /viewer an opportunity to experience – to play with –
different versions or interpretations of it.
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The notion of playfulness became a focus in the design of the digital
explorations that I created for two reasons. The emphasis of poetry
teaching in most primary and some junior classrooms is on language play.
The poetry of Shel Silverstein, Dennis Lee and Jack Prelutsky, for
example, delights children with word play, rhythm and rhyme, as well as
often silly subject matter. Indeed, de Castell and Jenson (2004) point out
that while ‘the rich potential of learning from games and play has not
been entirely unrecognised in education’, play-based approaches have
typically been reserved for the early years of a child’s education.
Blachowicz and Fisher (2004) offer four research-based statements about
the importance of word play in literacy development. They argue that
word play is motivating and an essential component of a word-rich
classroom, and calls on students to reflect in meta-cognitive ways on
words, word parts and context. Blachowicz and Fisher also suggest that
word play requires students to be active learners and capitalise on
possibilities for the social construction of meaning, and that word play
develops domains of word meanings and relatedness as it engages
students in practice and rehearsal of words (p. 219). These are all
important components of the English language arts programme, yet any
emphasis on play or fun in the teaching of poetry seems to dissipate in
the intermediate and senior grades. John B. Lee argues that ‘Serious
poetry is just an increasingly sophisticated form of play. The fun doesn’t
have to be quite so lively, but when you see someone witnessing the
deeper wells of herself or himself, then you know you’re doing your job.’
Inviting students to enter a poem by enabling them to play with words, as
one example, is a way to encourage play through new media.
Recently, I worked with a class of 11- and 12-year-old students on
digital poems. Their teacher had introduced the concept of metaphors,
and had asked them to write a poem based on an emotion. They were
to create five metaphors and to select images that might accompany
the text. One student, whose chosen emotion was anger, combined an
image of a smoldering forest fire to describe the sometimes brooding
nature of a fire waiting to burst into flame, like a snake ready to
strike. This student arranged the font to mimic the ‘curling smoke’. This
student also played with the transitions between his slides, timing them
so that they moved slowly for this particular image, but moved very
quickly when he described anger resembling ‘a volcano, bursting forth,
molten fire from a dragon’s massive mouth’. Students have been
writing concrete poems that play with the arrangement of text to create
a certain effect for decades; however, the use of digital media offers
new possibilities for this kind of play that include the use of sound,
visual image and not only the arrangement of text, but how it
‘behaves’ on screen. It also encourages students to think about how
the multimodal elements of new media converge with the words of the
poem to create new meaning.
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Integrated rather than singular
An illustrative example of the integrative potential of new media is Rachel
Thompson’s production of Penn Kemp’s Poem for Peace in Two Voices
(2002) (visit http://faculty.uoit.ca/hughes/Research/poetry.html), which
has been translated into 102 languages. This video performance integrates
various readings of the poem, in several languages, performed at different
times and places, along with added images, video clips and sound track,
into a single, new reading. The video affords the reader the opportunity
to experience the poem visually at the same time as hearing several oral
readings simultaneously. It sounds like it might be confusing, but as
Kemp points out, the result is quite effective, especially when sound is
juxtaposed against the visual images of people from different cultures
reading and images of world conflicts.
The video production of Poem for Peace in Two Voices illustrates how
new media affords the creation of poetry performance that cuts across
space and time, bringing together clips of life that are recombined and
converge to create a new poetry performance, one that is more than the
sum of its parts. The New London Group (1996) argue that people in
contemporary society ‘create and innovate by hybridising’ or articulating
in new ways ‘established practices and conventions within and between
different modes of meaning’ (p. 30). They use the example of popular
music which often combines cultural forms or traditions that are
‘recombined or restructured’ often through the use of technology. Kemp’s
video also serves as an example of hybridity. Her poem, originally written
in print text has been ‘restructured’ or ‘redesigned’ by new media
resulting in a changing relationship between text, audio and visual
meanings.
Our students are immersed in shared digital spaces that seem to
encourage or expect this kind of integration. Of course, such a pluralist
view raises issues of ownership that are still being debated. Those of us
working with students in digital spaces must be cognisant of copyright,
encouraging the use of copyright free music and images or, better still,
encouraging students to create their own images (either electronically
generated using draw or paint software, hand generated and scanned or
using a digital camera) and music.
Looking ahead
Researchers are only beginning to understand how multimodal, interactive
media successfully attract, capture, and hold the attention of students
(Jonassen, 2000; Gee, 2003; de Castell and Jenson, 2004). Certainly using
new media in the reading, writing and representing of poetry motivates
students if only because it offers a new and fresh classroom approach.
However, what new media adds to the study of poetry goes beyond
motivation.
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The performative potential of new media encourages students to explore
poetry with new forms of linguistic and visual play, and perhaps helps to
move students beyond observing and analysing poetry, toward
encouraging a dialogue with a poem. It allows students to get inside the
poem, to be co-creator, to play with the language of the poem and to
offer their own responses and interpretations. Poetic language disrupts the
familiar, and causes us to pay attention not only to what is being said, but
the way it is being said as well. Using new media in the reading, writing
and representing of poetry also causes us to pay attention because the
poem is being presented in an unfamiliar way, where text, image and
sound converge in ways that they cannot in conventional print
anthologies.
The notion of poetry as performance supports the view that students
need to be producers as well as consumers of poetry. Youth are naturally
concerned with emerging identities, and they are trying to find ways to
express themselves. Through poetry writing, adolescents can give voice to
those things that concern them most. We need to provide them with
opportunities to think about who they are and what they want to
represent to the world through, not only what they say, but also how they
say it, and writing poetry using new media offers a fresh way to engage
them in the writing process.
It is clear that the whole package is important – the poem on the page,
the poem in the air as it is spoken aloud, and the poem as it is presented
or performed. New media lift the poem from the print-bound page. New
media offer the opportunity to integrate all aspects of poetry presentation,
and make them accessible in a public and non-linear way. The
performance affordances of new media encourage a sense of audience,
and a collective, integrative approach to the creation of poetry that
honours multiple modes of expression. Consider the immensely popular
YouTube, whose motto is ‘broadcast yourself’, where people from around
the world gather to view performances of various kinds. The new media
that is infusing the Web draws us into performative relationships with and
representations of our ‘content’ whether it is poetry or some other subject
matter.
Despite the popularity of the Web for bringing people together in various
ways through new communication tools, the shift from a print culture to a
culture suffused with new media has not yet been realised in the
classroom, particularly in the area of poetry study. I am not suggesting
that the print form is no longer useful in a digital age, but rather, we have
new forms of expression that extend our ability to express ourselves.
Immersing students in a digital environment that serves as a model for
their own digital performances, views performance as a purposeful and
creative process interwoven with other literacy events. Such an approach,
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which fully engages the student in all areas of the language arts – reading,
writing, viewing, representing, speaking and listening – realises the
pedagogical ideal expressed by the poets in my study that students
experience poetry through sustained and active engagement, and that
they pay attention not only to the meaning of the poem, but also to its
music and its artistry.
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