I respect poetry as I respect every art form, however, lately I haven’t been impressed with what poetry had to offer. Perhaps it’s my fault, since poetry is not what I prefer to read. With that said, I enjoyed reading Deena Larsens’ “Firefly,” because it gave me a different perspective on this literary genre. She had proven to me that a dying art, like poetry, can not only be reinvented by simply allowing the reader to be part of the poem, but that it can also be for everybody – that it does not have to bear the 21st century’s stigma of elitism. Thus regardless if you like poetry or not, “Firefly” is for you!
“ Firefly” is a six stanza poem that defies traditional poetry by being interactive, and by merging a variety of representational styles. It has five alterable lines in any given stanza placed in front of different pictures. While this poem has a variety of line sequences, it only has seven pictures to go with them. This may sound bad – I certainly thought, “How amazing it would be if there was a different picture for every line variation” – but realizing that such a concept would require over 90,000 pictures, I figured that I should be content with the poem as it’s. After all I failed to find any two lines that produced a nonsense stanza. Don’t believe me? Then knock yourself out Neo, and delve into this Matrix.
Poetry prides itself on being able to create vivid images with a few words, and so I found it interesting that Larsens decided to put pictures behind her words that corresponded to the overall feeling of her original poem. Why did she do it when it lessened the enigma surrounding the conventional evocative meaning of the poem? Perhaps because this digital poem’s evocative meaning comes not from its words, but rather from its digital presentation, and if this presentation tells us anything, then it’s that this poem is not about the author, but it’s about the reader. Larsens freed poetry from its shackles by giving the reader the chance to forgo the task of trying to figure out the poet’s elusive intention – who can know another man’s thoughts anyways – and let the reader decide what the poem is about. In Larsens’ poem, for once, the reader can become the poet.