'The Caravan': Thresholds and fault lines in digital space

Digital poetry can foreground and explore the inherently unstable nature of poetic composition and the protean, and often unruly forms, of new media poetry. Rosemary Huisman lists the components of such poetry as ‘a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinks, interactivity, real-time text generation, spatiotemporal discontinuities, self-similarity, synthetic spaces, immateriality, diagrammatic relations, visual tempo [and] multiple simultaneities’ (1999: 160). This practice-led paper explores how a traditional poem on the page may be translated into such a ‘new syntax’, and the kinds of things that happen to the work when this occurs. In this practice-led research project, Jordan Williams has taken a ‘finished’ poem by Paul Hetherington, ‘The Caravan’ and has created two versions: one disassembles and re-inflects it as a digital work which uses several of the components Huisman lists; the other leaves the poem virtually intact and plays only with visual time, visual line, and visual rhythm. This has produced digital works that read differently from the original, but also differently from each other. They each bear a different relationship to the original poem and analysing these differences speaks to the challenge of extending the language of poetics to digital forms.