Abstract:

"Bridging the Gap: Writing, Reading, and Critiquing Digital Poetry" is a collection of short essays that explore what digital poetry is, how it is written, how it operates, and how it is read. Investigating the theories of Philippe Bootz and Bruce Andrews that emphasize the distance separating the author and the reader, I counter their arguments by detailing my own strategies for dealing the with the text when I engage in either of these roles. In an interactive work, the author should consider the reader's control over spatial and temporal recombination while the reader should engage with the piece purposefully and thoughtfully. I also discuss my interactive installation, The Pace , to address the tensions between the author's intentions and the reader's autonomy. Ultimately, it is language, in all its forms (verbal, visual, auditory, haptic, kinetic, et cetera), that intersects these polar figures and provides a common ground for communication. Considering the impermanent nature of nonlinear and interactive poetry, critics often find it hard to explicate text that we are unable to reproduce, and instead discuss technical components of the work.