porpentine. == poetry?

if you want to see work which is "unignorable"
if you want to see work which is "fresh"
if you want to see work which is accessible
if you want to see work which does new things with language
if you want to see work which broaches a lot of intense personal subjects
go look at porpentine porpentine porpentine

these are "games" more than poems... but still composed entirely out of language in sort of poem-like ways... using hyperlinks and macros... perhaps closer to interactive fiction (as the site advertises)? but assuredly unlike fiction in many ways...

from: howling dogs

We can consider this poetry b/c it's experimental... Poetry I guess is closer to the lines of "experimental words" or "experimental literature" than fiction? But again, maybe aspects of this isn't entirely experimental... "Nonstandard Literature"? Genre distinctions, the black hole of criticism/analysis...

What I mean to say is, Porp's games have a sort of defining quality in being attractive and click-through-able and innovative and also undoubtedly "literature"... But they are also built around a kind of punk aesthetic, see this excerpt from some of her writing:

Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms.

This quote being part of the work porp + friends built around the experience of being trans, being abused by various communities and treated as trash and so forth. A lot of the art comes as a consequence and method of coping to this abuse... therefore "trashbabe." Here's some more...

This is an original motivation + struggle + creative impulse, resulting in glorious, fresh, and appealing art... and it's in a (mostly written) form... You'd be lucky to find that in poetry. "Poetry is dead," as they say, but, you know, people are still doing interesting things with language and verse and lyric in different mediums such as for example rap... news to no-one... but this trans art trashbabe stuff also happens to be in the form of and strongly about video games, that defining new medium which most people don't have a whole lot of good things to say about, gamergate discussions non-nonwithstanding...

I just largely want to say: in the greater world of art, not just in Pittsburgh, I'm always frustrated by my own indifference to poetry... all the poetry put in front of me, I barely care about, can't really finish a chapbook without it feeling like work. However, there's a lot of language stuff I do care about which isn't really poetry, stuff that I spend much time with, like the work of porp... but to exclude these things from poetry is to put limitations on what poetry can be. Better than to stick to a genre, as I have done, is to stick to whatever appeals to you... stay less focused on one place, find the true patterns of your meaning--poetryburgh@gmail.com