Cyberspace goes poetic
Samantha Perera
Poetry can be considered as the most influential yet most aesthetic
form of literature. As the digital era has arrived, we cannot refrain
from talking about digital poetry. Whether it is conventional or
digital, poetry is always supposed to be the soothing element of human
kind.
The market for new poetry is small; it is not bought and sold like
modern art, or hankered after by the very wealthy. In fact, if you
consider poetry by brutal commercial rules, it is a miracle it exists at
all.
But that does not mean that poetry is not embraced by the youth
generation. Yet not only does poetry exist, it is flourishing – and not
just among the grand old oaks of literary society, but in the grassroots
of bohemia. New, young writers are using poetry to break rules and free
themselves creatively.
Many credit the internet for bringing youthful poetic creativity out
of bedrooms and private notebooks and into the light. Social networking
site Facebook has recently paved the way to new poets emerge into the
field of creative writing.
This would be the perfect time to talk about digital poetry, Facebook
and its impact on literature as one of the pioneer Facebook poets,
Indika Gunawardhana, launches his first poetry book which contains poems
only published on Facebook. Indika’s book Hithe Ketu Tattoo (Tattoos
lettered on heart) will be launched at National Library Services Board
on December 24 at 3 pm.
Where prose invokes the linearity and the arbitrariness of the
written word, poetry promotes non-linear configurations.
Who is a wreader? The word wreading is the result of the fusion of
two different words; writing and reading, and it represents a response
to the increasingly active role of the reader in modern literature. With
the concept of wreading, poetry especially published online gets a new
dimension. We can often observe that an instant response for an online
poem.
Sometimes it could be a form of an answer or an extension to the
original poem.
In order to provide a definition of digital poetry, it is important
to clarify what is meant by poetic discourse. One promising approach is
contrasting poetry with prose. Where narrative informs, poetry suggests.
Furthermore, in poetry language is not transparent, but rather
opaque, and it reveals the construction and the becoming of meaning
itself, entailing the wreader in its own production.
The sense of the vagueness in poetry is the results of a blending of
contrasts; in poetry there is not a clear distinction between abstract
and concrete, ideal and material, or general and particular. Instead,
poetic words remain in between; they are both redundant and ambiguous.
Poetry is thus circumscribed only by indeterminacy, and it is this
indeterminacy which makes of poetry an expressive medium to speak the
unutterable. Facebook is a mode of communication which most of the
people attend while they work, play or rest.
Poetry published in there has a lot more potential than poetry in
print media. Indika always experimented on new techniques like
visualizing his writings. And most of all Indika’s poetry was well
nourished with timely themes and trends.
Experimental poetry is based on the notion of open work. In the
definition provided by Umberto Eco, the open work produces in the
interpreter acts of conscious freedom, putting him at the centre of a
net of inexhaustible relations among which he inserts his own form.
Eco contrasts the open work with the conventional closed work, which
leads the reader to pre defined interpretations insinuating that the
former rejects conventional views of the world proposing instead an
awareness of the fragmentation, the discontinuity and the dissonance our
media saturated environment. In this sense Facebook poetry of Indika has
opened some windows to his readers to see beyond what they are actually
forced to see by their environment.
As Ralph W Emerson has well suggested, that language were composed of
fossilized metaphors. We are symbols and inhabit symbols and being
infatuated with the economical use of things, we do not know that they
are thoughts.
The poet gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten and
put eyes and a tongue in every dumb and inanimate object.
This note is dedicated to the pioneer Facebook poet Indika
Gunawardhana for his courageous journey through the cyberspace as an
emerging poet. His work has given a value to the social networking site
of Facebook as a source which provides education as well as wholesome
entertainment. |
