Paper Response

Using Digital Media to Interpret Poetry: Spiderman Meets Walt Whitman by Mary B. McVee, Nancy M. Bailey and Lynn E. Shanahan

McVee, Bailey, and Shanahan’s primary concerns revolve around the idea of digital epistemology in an educational context, specifically using contemporary technical mediums such as PowerPoint to reignite educational interest in literary forms like poetry. Their argument strikes a particular chord in me, as I hold fast to the idea that the world today operates with digital experiences as constitutive elements of our frames of reference. That is to say, those who have significant experience with contemporary technological tools can begin to understand and to interpret the human experiences of poetry through the lenses of their exposure to mediums like films, clips, and images.

What’s most exciting to me is that this filtering of literary forms is not limited to a one-way interpretation of more traditional texts. It also offers an endless array of possibilities in what the multimedia, multimodal creation of poetry can mean. Movements like the Concrete Poetry movement have already explored what it might mean to use modern techniques to showcase poetry in more physical forms, and many poets have already begun to explore what poetry might mean as NFTs. I think this thread is one worth exploring, especially with the ever-growing tools available for more immersive, poetic storytelling.

Moodboard

https://www.are.na/paul-chung/thesis-cuhyijcmhri

Dream Review

Paul Chung’s multimodal storytelling demonstrates a great deal of contemplation on what the boundaries of poetry mean in a multimedia-first context. The many layers of technical mediums used between the words themselves and their immersive end product do not detract from the communication of a human experience. Instead, they add an interesting and engaging perspective to the potential future of poetics in a time where print media has largely fallen to the wayside.