Poem as a Picture: Eduardo Kac’s Digital Poetry and the Interdisciplinary Relationship Between Holographic Media and Literature

This study expounds the symbolism of Eduardo Kac’s digital poetry in the context of N. Katherine Hayles’ review of electronic literature and W.J.T. Mitchell’s image analysis. This accounts for Willard Bohn’s study of visual poetry which stages images in the form of letters. The American Poet/ artist Kac (1962 -) departs from the traditional poem and experiments with types of digital poetry like holo-poetry and bio-poetry. Some of Kac’s digital poetry is reviewed in Media Poetry: An International Anthology (2007). Philippe Bootz differentiates between what he calls the transitoire observable which refers to a factual depiction of the image in the outer world and the reader’s indepth analysis. From this standpoint, Kac’s artistic pieces show how electronic literature maintains a manipulation of the digital apparatus in order to redefine standards of the literary work. Mitchell develops the study of iconology which is concerned with the image meanings in themselves, and in their relation with the written word or the pictorial text and other visual media. In picture theory, he divides his study of pictures into three sections; namely “The Pictorial Turn,” “Metapictures,” and “Beyond Comparison”. As a key example, in “Metapictures,” Mitchell analyzes three forms of pictures or picture as a reflection of itself, picture within picture and picture in the written text. Through analyzing selected digital poems by Kac, the researcher gives an innovative dimension to the literary experience.