Digital poetry: reading Jim Andrews’ “Seattle Drift” and “Arteroids”

Abstract

Digital technology is reshaping literature and literary creativity. Digitisation of traditional texts is a common practice now, and reading digitally is widely deemed as convenient and time effective. While such changing practices of texts reservation and reading are often matters of intellectual and popular discussions, relatively little attention is given to literature exclusive made for and within digital realm. E-Literature or Electronic Literature is the term used to define literature created taking the advantages of network and/or stand alone computers. Although still an ever-evolving genre, within E-literature, digital or hypertext poetry is now an established trend. Digital and hypertexts poems are increasingly getting popularity, and the genre is finding its way to western academia. This thesis is an analysis of digital poetry as a genre, which is still relatively little known in Bangladesh. I will analyse two digital poems namely “Seattle Drift” (1997) and “Arteroids” (2001) by Jim Andrews, one of the prominent poets in the field of digital poetry. Like other digital literary pieces, digital poetry has also contributed to the changing pattern of reading literature. With the reference of these two poems I will analyse the writing as well as the reading methodologies of digital poems, and will examine its possibility in academia.