The Digital Poetry of Thomas Swiss
Thomas Swiss is an American Poet and professor of English and Rhetoric at the University of Iowa. He has written and edited many books on the role of the internet in American culture, and books of poetry. There hasn’t been a lot written about his past or his inspiration and motivation to write poetry. Swiss has a website dedicated to his digital poetry. The website is a collaborative effort between Swiss and several web animation designers and photographers. Several of the poems can be found in his book Rough Cut: Poems. For this research project I will critique some of his digital poems and explain what I learned from them and how they affected me.
The first poem I want to talk about is “Shy Boy”. This is a poem about a shy boy in school who wishes he could disappear. The digital animation for this poem is very basic. It has a white background and uses grey bars that vary in size and length. In between these gray bars is the text of the poem. Some of the lines of the poem fade in and fade out, and some glade across the screen. As I watched this animation, I wondered what do the grey bars represent? For most of the animation the bars fit snugly around the text of the poem. So I thought that it could be Swiss’ way of using the bars a symbol of tightness or being uncomfortable. The speaker in the poem says “You know what he wants to do? Vanish./ If he could make this difficult wish come true,/ but he can’t. Like an eclipse./ (page 52)
This quote from the poem paints a picture of a kid who is somewhat socially awkward who wishes he could disappear. “Shy Boy” in terms of subject matter and content is my favorite of the Swiss digital poems because I can relate to it. I used to be the shy kid in class who barely spoke, and stayed to himself. When I was reading the poem it took me back to my childhood. Although the animations for this poem are basic, it does a good job of getting the message across to the reader.
The second poem I’d like to discuss is “The Problem”. There aren’t any moving animations in this poem, but there are a lot of stationary animations and graphics. “The Problem” is a poem about how a man meets a woman at a play rehearsal. The man and woman develop a friendship, but after a while the man begins to see the woman’s true personality. The woman has drinking issues and constantly needs someone to talk to. The man can’t seem to pull himself away from the woman despite being annoyed by her. The speaker of the poem says “I was too vain and needy. And her? Worse. Calling me on the phone or coming over. I mean pretty soon my whole was her. I couldn’t do anything else. It was always listen I have to talk. And I heard the urgency. I heard the desperation in her voice. That hooked me.” On opening night of the play everything goes smoothly. The man and woman go to the movies to see “The Blue Angel” where they decide to end their friendship.
“The Problem” is constructed out of images of the man and woman, and random pieces of paper with handwriting on them. There are also some images of a man and woman with tape on their eyes and mouth that are somewhat disturbing. The way this poem is designed is exactly what I want to do with my own poetry. I want to be able to combine the text of the poetry with images that will help bring the poem to life the same Swiss has done with this poem. I’m learning how to use images to enhance the meaning behind the words of my poetry.
The poem “City of Bits” is constructed similarly to “The Problem” with images of the city with each line and stanza of the poem displayed in various types of text. “City of Bits” is a poem about a man who meets a woman while going for a stroll in the downtown area of the city. They have a brief conversation and during that conversation the woman is mugged while jogging. The man goes on living his life, and sees the woman at a concert in Chicago a few years later. After seeing her at the concert, they part ways again. The man beings missing her and is surprised to receive a message from her on his voicemail. She leaves a voicemail describing a dream and she asks how did she know he would stroll again?
I noticed a recurring theme in Swiss’ poems the recurring theme is that the main characters in his poems seem to be socially awkward. In “Shy Boy” the boy wishes he could vanish so he wouldn’t have to deal with his class mates. In “The Problem” the man is kind of regretfully intrigued by a woman with a drinking problem and psychological issues, and in “City of Bits” the man is loner who meets a woman he has very little interaction with, but he misses her as if she is a loved one. I wonder how much of Swiss’ personal life is in his poems?
Shy Boy: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/shyboy/shyboy.html
The Problem: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/problem/content.html
City of Bits: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/cob/index.html
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