Digital Poetry: Is it good or just a good idea?

Before I really begin my analysis of Stephanie Strickland's 1997 talk, Poetry in the Electronic Environment, I have to admit that there are very few digital poems that I have come across and have actually enjoyed. I know that it is for this reason that I am so fascinated with digital poetics-I see it as an exciting new challenge for writing. Granted, I have only been exposed to a limited amount of digital poems so I am speaking from a humble and somewhat inexperienced standpoint. Either way, I feel I have read/experienced enough digital poems to have formed an opinion and here are some examples of digital poems I am convinced by, or enjoy: Dakota by Young-hae Chang, Dim O'Gauble by Andy Campbell (and other poems on New River) and Lollipop Noose/Hangman (below) by Todd Seabrook.

I suppose I should define what I mean by 'enjoy' and 'convinced'. When I enjoy a poem, or any work of art it is because the work evokes a strong emotional response from me. By convinced I mean more of my intellectual response to the piece. In other words, if there is a small or absent emotional response to the work, I would like there to be an interesting conceptual aspect to it that stimulates me intellectually. Maybe I am a reader response critic when it comes to digital poetics...

In Dakota, I enjoy the pacing of the poem, the simple but strong visual impact that the music and motion that text makes and the lack of reader control. At the same time, I think the writing is the weakest aspect of the poem. In what other form of poetry or writing is it ever true that a reader can say the writing is weak but that the piece is still strong? This is where my dilemma, or my conflict with digital poetics lies. I guess this is why I constantly fight the urge to call digital poems, digital poems. They aren't just poems because poems are words and paper. Digital poems as Strickland details in Poetry in the Electronic Environment have the potential to be much more than that. She seems to take the stand that this is better and in one sense I agree with her but on the other hand, I don't. I agree that digitizing writing carries the potential for creating an intersection between art and text and even text and text that was not possible with just the page, which ultimately can be seen as 'better' than the page. At the same time, I have rarely seen a digital poem that contains writing that is as interesting as the piece is conceptually or technologically. Strickland says in her discussion of hypertext and poetry (keep in mind this was spoken in 1997):

"In general, I think one could say about contemporary hypertext poetry that radical innovation does not reside at the level of the alphabetic text, with the major exception of authors who are themselves programmers. For those using off-the-shelf products, the changes reside in how to structure and divide text and how to accommodate the powerful set of co-players the text has acquired, that make for on-screen reading experiences both more radically individual and more adventurous than page-reading."

It is the last sentence here that really interests me because she slips in that digitizing poetry can make reading more adventurous and radically individual. The potential for the adventurous and individual qualities of interactive textual art is definitely there, I will give her that. The question that keeps badgering me however is, is that what readers of 'poetry' are looking for? What are readers of poetry seeking? Are we interested in the mere idea of a digital poetic more than the actual works themselves? As a poet and a reader of poetry, to oversimplify, I am drawn to poems whose words are sonically pleasing, intellectually challenging and semantically interesting at the same time. I hold the same standards to digital poetics and maybe it is my ideas about this new art form that need to change in order to appreciate it more or perhaps, it is the art itself that needs to come a little further and better realize its full potential.