It’s been a fun week sharing each others’ poems, and I’m very happy with the feedback that I received on my own poem! I’ve got a long way to go before I’m satisfied with my skills, but new possibilities have been demonstrated to me, and I’m excited to continue exploring the space more. I was really impressed by the other students’ poems, and I think seeing what they had to offer helped me to learn more about the different routes one can take when reading and writing poetry. I think as an added exercise, in addition to practicing reading and writing poetry, I might want to seek out other peoples’ opinions on poetry that I’m reading.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how poetry encourages us to play with the form of the text; specifically, I’ve been noticing how diegetic text within videogames, and even all of a game’s text, could be considered poetry. Videogames are a multimedia composition and end up in their own category of art, but some are more poetic than others; it’s interesting to imagine a poem which changes based on how the reader reacted to earlier parts of a poem. There’s a long history of games which have multiple endings, which reflect choices made by the player over the course of the game. These types of choices make the most sense when they’re ludonarritively consistent—When the choices the player makes feel inline with how they change the story. This sort of harmony between content and presentation is a great asset when you really want to infuse an emotion into the audience.