What is at stake?
October 26, 2009
My rhetorical analysis on Oni Buchanan’s Mandrake Vehicles presents not only an interesting study of the cut-up method and other rhetorical strategies, it represents a possible future. In this future will animated poetry be the the norm or will it be a new genre of writing altogether, like Shakespeare did with his sonnets? Or, will Oni Buchanan’s style of flash animated poetry be an anomaly, never to be repeated kind of like Cathy Park Hong’s amalgamated language poetry. If you think about it, “The Mandrake Vehicles” is also an amalgamated language. It is the combination of written language and visual,textual language to create a new language. What shall we call it? Oni Buchanan still refers to her work as poetry, because essentially it is. But actually it is more than that and I’n not sure if we can go on calling it poetry when it breaking the boundaries. Animoetry? That sounds silly, but I’ve made my point.
Will Buchanan be the next Shakespeare, shaking up the literary world and changing poetry as we know it? Probably not, but she does open up a world of possibilities for the future of poetry. If Buchanan’s work builds up enough momentum in the literary world, one of two things will happen: 1.Poetry will be redefined to include technological adjustments to text or 2. Buchanan will cause a divide poetry into two separate realms, plain text poetry and animated/technologically altered poetry. Technology is not going anywhere, in fact it is claiming more and more territory in the literary world.
Poetry weathered the transition from orality to literacy just fine. In fact, Shakespeare was still working in those constraints. After all, that’s why meter and rhyme matter: we can “hear” them. (They make no difference visually, so in a sense Buchanan’s poetry is a way of dealing with our visual “extensions,” right?)
Mary, if there’s anything I’m still looking for here, it’s more of a sense of how the poem works rhetorically. Redefining the literary genre only takes us so far. The real question is figuring out what kind of an impact it could have on the audience. You can save the more literary questions, of what is poetry, or the essence of poetry, for the last project.