Eight or ten years ago, I used my Amazon Kindle every day. In that first heyday of e-books, I might have expected all of our bookshelves and libraries to be obsolete by 2025. Now, that little paperwhite tablet gathers dust in the abyssal zone of my desk drawer while I install another bookshelf to handle volumes I collected during college.
There are great reasons to digitize art: accessibility on publications like Substack, preservation of historic texts, a lower carbon footprint, but elevating (or even maintaining the original quality of) art is rarely one of them.
The way canvas paintings lose their sense of texture, depth and scale when converted to .png or .jpg, fiction and poetry lose-out when they leave the page in favor of cyberspace. They become ephemeral, a fluid blur of scrolling or swiping. Reading comprehension seems to suffer, and it becomes harder to place events which don’t correspond to a physical location on the page.
But… shouldn’t it be possible to elevate text with technology, as film improves a script? Isn’t a blog elevated by the ability to include seamless links to relevant articles and crucial sources. What about fiction? What about poetry? That was just my feeling, a creative nagging which tripped me into a rabbit-hole I’ve been tumbling down for almost… two years now? Good grief.
Maybe someday soon I’ll hit bottom and bounce out into Wonderland.
What would a poem look like if it wasn’t just recorded digitally, but if it could only be written and read digitally? If you’re a poet, a poetry reader, or a normal person — I have something new to show you. I guarantee you’ve never seen it before.
So, that’s footage of me reading/playing a poem in an interactive poetry collection I’m composing called Dream the Dragon Awoke. The collection is about a dream (a Nightmare) I had during my second year of college. It was a big dream, the kind of Dream which — like the best art — feels more real than reality. It changed my life, no understatement, and dreams shouldn’t be able to do that.
I’ll tell that story another time.
Whose Woods Are These was the first interactive poem I wrote, and has only a few features.
Progress, how the poem only writes itself when you click it forward.
Roulettes, certain words or phrases which you can click to reveal alternate meanings.
The Glossary is also transformative, especially by making the poem and its references more accessible.
That one was very simple. But, I became more ambitious. More poems came knocking. Unable to contain my ideas in word-editors, I began filling a notepad with half-poetry/half pseudo-code.
What began in a humble Choose-Your-Own-Adventure engine called Twine overran the engine’s constraints and demanded I learn to program in earnest.
Having spent much of my childhood passion on mathematics and computers, it didn’t take long to learn a game engine called Godot, which would open infinitely more possibilities.
I stopped writing short stories. I stopped sending things for publication. I stopped writing songs. I started blogging, and then stopped because it was too distracting. That was months ago. I’m still not done — not nearly done.
I am, however, through the looking glass — as indicated by you reading this. I’ve pushed things far enough to begin showing them to the world — to you.
I know I’m not alone in tumbling down this rabbit-hole. I’m certainly not the first, but when I look around I can hardly see anyone else here. Modern poetry is a small field, and interactive poetry an even smaller one — nearly microscopic.
I’d like to change that, at least a little. My collection won’t be done until the end of the summer (at the earliest). If you want more right now, you should look into the Electronic Literature Organization. They cover more than just poetry, but can guide you to a small handful of pieces… And to be honest that’s it — a handful, a niche of a niche.
If you know of any great interactive poetry, please leave a comment or send me a message. I’ve been searching for more than a year and have unearthed a few gems, but mostly scraps and dry leaves.
And of course if you want to receive updates on my work specifically you’re welcome to subscribe. It’ll be done when it’s done. But if you have any ideas, questions, want to know how to make your own interactive poetry, etc, you can send me a message/comment here.
Good luck, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. Don’t be afraid to chase weird and impractical ideas, as long as they fill you with purpose… even if they take multiple years to complete. And of course,
Have A Good One, - Nick F. Satnik