What is digital poetry? The definitions are decidedly nebulous.
The term digital poetry has been applied to a variety of creative literary applications, from work developed in Flash and DHTML to MOO spaces and works that utilize Perl. From cybertext to web art, digital poetry is somewhat interchangeable with other terms used to describe what could be called creative cultural practice through applied technology. We can agree that digital poetry as hypermedia presents an expanded field of textuality that moves writing beyond the word, toward a relationship between signs and sign regimes, their integration, disintegration, and interaction one to another. But, how these relationships are established in digital poetry is as diverse and various as the practice itself.
Digital poetry does not properly define any specific type of expressive object. Because of this there are many problems that emerge for the reader/users of digital poetry and for those that deal critically with such work. Lacking a definite object of study, we must begin to move away from the idea of poetry as a genre toward an observation of applied poetics -- a poetics that is based in an individual author’s engagement with media technologies, as scripted, programmed and applied within a particular work.
Using Artaud’s notion of the mise en scène, as outlined in The Theater and its Double, as a guide, this chapter explores new models for the close reading of digital poetry. Rather than work from a model that hopes for a close reading through the abstraction of words from their media-rich environment, this chapter proposes that critics and readers take a more choragraphic (to borrow a term from Gregory Ulmer) approach to reading that observes the entirety of a work, from interface design to interactivity, the written word and code. By examining digital poetry objects as a whole we may begin to recognize how each work presents an individuated applied poetics and move away from overreaching taxonomic designations. As well, this chapter proposes that more critical work be developed in hypermedia environments as a way of diminishing critical/theoretical detachment from the realities of creative digital practice.