Sometimes, it's best that one procrastinates and never shakes one's self of that sweet yet nagging self-indulgence of inaction. Then one can spare one's self and the world of one's inanities or overblown, hypertectual meanderings. "Hypertext poetry"? Unless one has seeded the internet with one's own works and then used them to compose a poem (or any other literary work, for that matter) one is plagiarising on a massive scale. This is not poetry. The effort of allowing one's mind, as a creator or a reader, to travel in the fluidity of hypertext may be poetic but to call the result a work of (original) poetry is, in my humble opinion, sheer balderdash. It is web-surfing and that act may or may not be poetic in its execution but the result is not poetry. All the verbosity and pseudo-intellectual blather in the world will not salvage this canard. Redefining an art form in one's own vision of it is not a new exercise. But naming it "hypertext poetry," particularly, in the absence of any examples goes beyond the pale. I'm all for experimentation but "hypertext poetry" is an exercise in fulitlity taken to the extreme. I suspect someone went strolling among the trees and lost sight of the forest and its constraints. Poetry is a medium which is not limited to the page. Its origins were in the oral tradition. A poem was recited. It could be short or even an epic. Regardless of its length it was a means of communicating that made sense to the poet and the auditors. It increasingly became incomprehensible to newer audiences who had lost touch with the allegorical references or were too intellectually lazy to make an effort to understand the poet and his poem, especially, when the alternative modes of entertainment provided more facile comprehension and enjoyment. Poems could also be created by the collective input of several poets. However, to conceive of a poem as an exercise in the realm of hypertext is to launch into space without a particular destination in mind, ultimately, to be lost in oblivion. Try reading to an audience a poem created in hypertext at a poetry venue. If you want to write the Iliad or the Mahabharat, that's one thing but pray do not drag us through hypertext to do it. Poetry is straining to keep a hold on its rapidly dimninishing audience, as it is. I sincerely doubt that it will retain, much less gain, an audience when one needs to explain its new form with a treatise such as has been presented. Enough said. Mani Suri
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