Digi-po

There have been a couple of Harriet posts lately about visual poetry, but little regarding digital poetry. It's time to correct that! Australian digital poet Jason Nelson has a built a portal featuring a large selection of his work. The pieces are wide-ranging, from digital poetry games to virtual 3D spaces. Each piece comes with a description that functions as a short artist’s statement, making it easier to contextualize the work within the discourses of poetry and art. For example, Nelson writes about the intersection of video games and poetry:

Video games are a language, a grammar or linguistics of various texts. The sounds, the movement, the graphics, the rules or lack of rules, everything about a video game is a component of language. …..

A digital poetry game must combine all these elements, strange and interactive stanzas, crossed out and obstructed lines, sounds and texts triggered and lost during the play. Indeed the game interface becomes a road to inhabiting the digital poem, to coaxing the reader/player into living and creating within the game/poetry space.