Poetry and Media

In my first post, I mentioned a poetry reading I had attended, and that it gave me some ideas concerning the combination of my studies in poetry and video games. As it turns out, I have just recently returned from another reading, this by Robyn Schiff, who is also a candidate for a teaching position here at Loyola. At the first reading, Joshua Marie Wilkinson spoke about the influence that various forms of media has had on his poetry. His poems are full of references to photography, painting, and especially cinema. Furthermore, his writing in some ways trys to actually replicate this visual forms in language. There is a strong reflection in his work of the kind of visual media culture that surrounds photography and film. After his reading I wondered what it might be like for the video game culture to find its way into poetry. I am quite pleased that I waited to post on this topic, because Schiff's reading gave me quite a bit of insight into one way that poetry and video game culture (or, at least, new media culture) might blend. She actually had a little bit of help from Dr. Jones on this one, as he asked a question that prompted a rather interesting answer out of her (I knew exactly what you were up to there, Dr. Jones). Robyn spoke of how her poetry often times winds in strange directions, dealing with one idea or image that leads to another, and then to another, and so forth. She specifically mentioned this as influenced by a "Google thought" or "internet thought," wherein ideas are literally linked together and lead to one another. In this way, her verse is kind of hypertextual, each idea linked to another in a chain that leads us forward. A kind of Myst-like poem, perhaps. Her comments really bring out how pervasive technology is in our society and world, influencing even the most traditionally "non-technological" forms of art, such as poetry. I'm excited to see what I can work out on my own in terms of immersing my own writing into the video game culture.