html poetics
i have been writing and self-publishing chapbooks for over a decade. i have noticed two things during that time. firstly:
the medium is the message.
⇝ marshall mcluhan
and secondly, voice, style, and content are affected by the means of production. when i write poems for letterpress forces brevity, where you can feel the cost of each piece of type. composing on a typewriter requires commitment; there is no easy revision, and so you have to really think before you type. producing for the mimeograph allows a sense of looseness and experimentalism, where I can compose poetry by hand and reproduce it. the computer gives you infinite undo, which makes for infinite drafts, which in turn creates a kind of endless sense of indecision.
i didn't choose these tools for aesthetic reasons alone. i chose them because each one pulls a different voice out of me.
the medium isn't just the message: it's also an editor.
the way the production of my poetry changes my writing is really behind the scenes, mostly hidden from you. just as your reception of my poetry is mostly hidden from me. this fascinates me. there is always a curtain between the writer and the reader.
this curtain can make sharing and publishing poetry particularly difficult. how, where, and with what we share our poems can be a daunting decision-making process. to ease the anxiety, i simply write and worry about the medium in which i will present later.
as a xillenial, a digital native, who came of age when the internet still felt like a commons, i still carry that early utopian assumption that sharing should be free, direct, and unmediated. so i often share my works online, even if published (oops), self-published, and printed to be distributed and sold for meagre amounts, typically covering printing and binding material, and distribution costs. digital publishing is nearly free in comparison.
i used to share on social media, but I don't use it much anymore. so before i started sharing pdfs, i thought i would make html chapbooks over at kmrowe.me, keeping in mind the message truly is the medium. when making them, i had to think about each stanza and each page. i was able to translate rather than simply transcribe the poems, all of which were written in various ways, into chapbooks that breathed a different sort of air than the printed versions.
at the moment i have five html chapbooks. each alive in their own way on the internet. my website has a theme picker (green crt, blue crt, or epaper), each giving a different feeling to the chapbooks. it was fun to experiment with this, while giving these poems another life in another world.
these are the first iterations of my html poems. one day, i hope to get as experimental and fancy as those over at the html review. but until then, i hope some folk enjoy what i have done. either way, the practice of creating them was fun for me. here is another robotamerica personality alongside one of my favourite chapbooks: