No Theory But For Practice by Hailey

In Born, Multimedia, and the Avante-Garde, the author discusses new media by means of interpreting literary works, and about nonverbal media as a literary form. The author discusses how published works were crafted in print and then interpreted into multimedia. In thinking about the magazine Born and how it is a new work of composing, people tend to find a tension between old and new technologies, and “that such uses of technology suggests an anxiety that poetry is insufficient in itself”. The theory discusses the composing and cross-pollinating between media and how it affects the way that readers view the content. At Texas State University, there are weekly book and poetry readings that students and faculty members are encouraged to attend.  On April 17^th, author Jorie Graham read some of her poetry aloud to attendees. It made me think about how the event would have been different if she had used technology to share her poems with the audience instead of just reading them. It would have been interesting to see people’s faces if there had been an interactive online version of her poetry that she could’ve showed. A multimodal presentation of poetry would add a new dimension to Graham’s poetry because writing cannot truly capture sound, yet multimedia can actually capture the spoken word within its text. The authors of Born magazine discuss how there is controversy when people take literature and add technology to it. I believe it is controversial because it is so different from what people have known for so many years. The tension that occurs when you “cross pollinate” technology with literature is interesting to study, and I wonder how members of the Texas State community would view the multimodality. 

-Hailey