Sea and Spar Between: An Analysis of the Digital Medium
Sea and Spar Between: The Ocean in the Web
There are many things you can do with a poem. You can write it on some paper, read it out loud, but why would you interweave a poem with the internet? Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s poem, Sea and Spar Between, is a new digital poem that can only be accessed on the web. “Norbert Bachleitner offers a somewhat spare definition of digital poetry, as ‘innovative works with specific qualities that cannot be displayed on paper’ “. Digital Poetry and in particular this poem, cannot be put on paper because it would lose the entirety of its meaning.
Imagine if “Sea and Spar Between” was written on some blue paper. Random stanzas of Dickinson and Melville broken apart and thrown across the page; Each phrase doesn’t mean much but together they follow the theme of the ocean. You’d have a lot of trouble figuring out what all this poem means without the digital aspect.
The reason why this poem is so fit for the digital form, is because it allows for change. A piece of paper is stagnant, while this poem is fluid. The poem is ever changing with the movement of your mouse. Added with the blue background and darker blue text, you slowly visualize water. Take another look, and punctuation is not fixed. While there are exclamation points, hey are solely for emphasis, like the crest of a wave crashing down. The ocean itself is constantly changing, it is fluid just like this poem.
The digital medium allows for Montford and Strickland to quantify poetic elements, which could not be expressed with pen and paper. Through the use of coding, this poem (or poetry generator) is able to express each stanza as a fish in the sea. With around 225 trillion fish in the sea, the authors are able to write 225 trillion stanzas, one for each fish, that could not physically be written. As poetry fanatic Leonardo Flores points out, it would take 6,421,232,876.71 years of reading non-stop, with a thirty second allocation for each stanza to be read.
The coordinate navigator is another aspect that enhances the readers poetic experience. Each move of the mouse takes you to a new coordinate with new stanzas tossed around the page. These X-Y plane coordinates are different from a normal cartographers coordinates, but you still get that sense of degrees of longitude and latitude that one sees with the map of the ocean. This ability to move yourself around the poem creates a sense of mystery and exploration. This emotional response is the same as exploring the ocean. If you zoom out of the poem, it looks like a bunch of blue stanzas of the same text moving about, but when you zoom in you realize the stanzas have different words and phrases. The ability to manipulate your own perspective is a fundamental part of this poem that can only be achieved through a digital platform.
One final part of digital poetry that relates to this poem is the meta-aspect of using the Internet to display this poem. Similar to the poem, the Internet is something created from code, structured, but contains and showcases a certain fluidity and depth. The Internet is both vast and deep, it contains almost all the knowledge in the world, and there is more to it than you see on the surface. By showcasing this poem through the Internet, the reader must acknowledge the presence of the Internet and what it brings to the poem.
Sea and Spar Between is the epitome of digital poetry. It is a form of media that could not be expressed any other way. Without the code, fluidity, or fact that it is through the Internet, Sea and Spar Between would just be random stanzas on a blue page.
Works Cited
“digital-poetry.” Poetry Beyond Text, www.poetrybeyondtext.org/digital-poetry.html. Accessed 6 Apr. 2017.
Flores, Leondardo. ““Sea and Spar Between” by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland.” I Love Poetry, edited by Leonardo Flores, Generate Press, 2 Jan. 2013, iloveepoetry.com/?p=117. Accessed 6 Apr. 2017.
Montfort, Nick, and Stephanie Strickland. Sea and Spar Between. SAIC, www.saic.edu/webspaces/portal/degrees_resources/departments/writing/DNSP11_SeaandSparBetween/index.html.
I like your take and explanation on this poem– you get straight to the point and I can follow you clearly, which is a strength to your writing. I often struggle to get straight to the meat of my argument and you did a great job! One thing to work on would be adding more explanation to the points youre making, a little more evidence can never hurt!
Nice job Spencer,
I thought you did a really thorough job backing up and explaining each of your points, usually separated by paragraphs. You’re really blunt which makes it really easy for me to understand. You say, “The reason why this poem is so fit for the digital form…” Then you dive into specific examples from the text in that paragraph. One idea I have is potentially making the post itself interactive. I don’t know if it would necessarily flow with what you’ve already written. But it could be cool to say, “Click on the link and explore the poem.” After directing them to interact with the poetry, you could then say, “doing that has this effect (“creates a sense of mystery and exploration” for example). I don’t know. Just a thought. You could also try and do something when you talk about how it wouldn’t have the same effect on normal blue paper. You could make your screenshot larger, and point to it, referencing how it loses certain features when it becomes a static image.
Spencer, your analysis of this poem was amazing. The way you compare the makeup of the digital poem itself to the actual ocean and the internet was very insightful. I think the conclusion to the poem is a bit abrupt. I think you could take a broader look at why digital poetry perhaps allows for more freedom than traditional poetry.