The growing popularity of software like Flash has ushered images, animation, sound, and kinetic typography into the poem, blurring the boundaries between film, graphic design, and computer games. Exploring the Web as a medium for new forms of artistic expression, digital artists, designers, programmers, and poets have collaborated to create some provocative work that alternately challenges and ignores the institutional apparatus for “traditional” or “mainstream” literature.

With the ability to create real-time, scalable, interactive, high-frame rate animation with sound in a file small enough to be suitable for Web delivery, Flash has quite literally set the Web in motion, emerging as an industry standard development tool used by both professional designers and amateur Web enthusiasts. While some poets see Flash as an ideal means for affordably and easily realizing interactive multimedia literature, critics suggest that Flash serves more to dumb-down poetry than it does to inspire fresh, insightful literary experiments.

The history of multimedia literature in the 20th century includes some innovative work, from using sound and images in Europe in the 1920s to “poem-painting” and “film-poem” experiments in the U.S. and elsewhere during the 1950s, as well as many other instances of collaborative and cross-genre work. While there is a growing body of significant and groundbreaking new media poetry, there is also a fair share of work rooted in less ambitious aspirations, winding up perhaps more Disney than Duchamp. The latter can certainly be enjoyable and well-designed; they can be very sophisticated visually, but they are less ambitious because they fail to impart on the viewer a larger sense of the complexities and contradictions that mark “good” art. Instead of challenging us, these works speak in a language we understand and tell us something that we already know.

We are all familiar, of course, with the language of motion. We see words and images move around screens every day, speaking in the moving language of electronic media: Visual codes we have learned through television, advertising, and film — from opening title and credit sequences to the graphically rich introductions of nightly news. The language of motion can speak as loudly as the language of words, a point of no small importance to those working with moving images and kinetic typography. Motion graphic designer Hillman Curtis explains: “In motion graphics, the motion can be more important and have more impact than the graphical element being moved. The way you choose to move, or not move, an element across the screen can enhance the meaning of that element greatly. If, for example, I choose to move a text element slowly, scaling and fading up from black and resolving center screen, I imbue that text element with a sense of drama, focus, and perhaps, stability.”

In graphic design, this is about communicating a message. In art, this can be used to question dominant ways of seeing. The text element that fades up from black and resolves center screen is also imbued with film language: Drama, focus, and so on, have been communicated to the viewer who is familiar with the codes of motion graphics through other media. When we see an element fade in or out, we know what to expect — a point of transition, a new scene, a dramatic conclusion.

Because new technologies (e.g., Flash) have made it easier to set text and images in motion, there is the risk that authors will incorporate movement into a work purely for visual excitement, reproducing visual codes with which we are familiar as a matter of style: Distressed, dreamlike, nostalgic, yet lacking critical reflection on the ways in which the manipulation of text, time, motion, and space can impact our perceptions, introduce contradictions, and add multiple layers of meaning to a work.

Overused clichés are metaphors are predictable and feel trite. Love is beautiful; death is sad; life is a journey… Poems that reiterate such things reaffirm what we already know. Bringing poetry to visual media means there will inevitably be new clichés — tired ways of using motion, obvious visual metaphors, and interactivity for its own sake. Some new media poems mask mediocre writing behind visual effects that may suggest “high quality production,” but do little to challenge our accustomed perceptual habits. As a result, artists may not want to move elements in a particular way because certain forms of motion are over-saturated, signaling “commercialized” or “produced.”

“Genius,” a web-based poem, is written by Thomas Swiss, designed by Skye Giordano, and features music by Randy Schoen. + View poem

On the other hand, artists may rely on a viewer’s familiarity with media codes in order to emphasize their effects. In “Genius,” for example, Skye Giordano sets the rhythm of Thom Swiss reading his poem against the environment in which the action takes place, using graphic effects to underscore the mediated language: “A camera tracks its flight;” “quick cut back;” “it was after all their scene.” As the woman watches the news or skims a magazine, we too watch through another media layer, another screen. The poem itself comes to us like a broadcast; MTV graphics and special effects editing meets CNN Headline News.

“Translating” a written poem from the page to the screen can sometimes do neither the original piece nor the new media a favor. New media, after all, doesn’t make a poem inherently any better or more appealing, just as film can’t make a book a better read. Big-screen literary adaptations which succeed do so not because they remain faithful to the fidelity of the original or because the novel as a form for this narrative was lacking, but rather, because these films were able to accomplish something in their own right, and not in the same way as the novel.

Indeed, in the case of “Genius,” the new media text offers a different reading than the words of the poem alone. For one thing, the text of the poem (read apart from the images) is primarily about the woman. She is the one watching television, reading a magazine, contemplating love handles, and dealing with the boredom, guilt, and pain of the daily routine. She is tired of the outbursts from the television (“Tiresome these interruptions”) and prays, “Don’t let it be like that for me.” There is only one line about her son: “About an hour ago her son said before napping, sleeping hurts me I don’t want to sleep anymore.” She goes on to speculate, “These days it seems nobody wants to, just like nobody wants to see their house blown apart.” But with the images, the sound and the motion, the impact of text changes significantly. The son, for example, has a bigger role. There is the image of the boy propped on his elbows (in prime TV-watching position); he is shown imagining a house being blown apart, and the viewer is led to believe that, perhaps, this is why sleeping hurts him.