First and foremost, I am a poet.

On top of that, I may be a little of a nerdhead. The idea of translating a medium that is traditionally considered static such as poetry into something moving, dynamic, interactive is something that fascinates me. The ability to add ambience, sound effects, music, text effects, choices, and stylistic decisions not possible on paper before open the door into a great realm of a new form of media, and a new form of storytelling.

Intuitively, with yet-to-be-discovered land comes yet-to-be-learned knowledge. In other words, with this new field of storytelling being opened before me, I realize I know very little of it. Not so much in the technical aspect of it, really. As someone who has been programming for almost a decade now, whatever technicality I need to get done I will get done in what I deem the smartest way possible, or at the very least with the least effort possible. The problem actually lies in how to present a story with this new format. Poetry is traditionally linear. You start a poem on a page, you keep reading that page, perhaps you even turn the page, and then the poem ends. The poem leads you wherever it needs to go. Now, with Twine as a tool, there are possibilities which escape traditional poetry. Not only there are sounds to be picked or designed, but resources even more fundamental to a story (and arguably one of the most important parts of Twine), links and choices.

Links and choices affect the structure of a poem more than one might think. Choices automatically imply a single read will not bring 100% of the content, or at least not in the same way. Links automatically imply non-linear content, content that jumps around… Choices also imply the acknowledgement of a second person, a reader-become-player, who has agency and is able to take decisions now. Poems are not to be configured linearly now, but as paths, as trees, as meshes… Adapting to this new way of writing is extremely hard, and it will be for a long time since I still write linearly. I feel like right now, I am not using it to its fullest extent.

In the case of this short Twine interactive poem, I experimented with writing five poems at the same time in my head, which then I linked together by how my thoughts flowed in my head. This shows in very specific ways in the work. The five poems however, hide a sixth poem, which would be the collection itself. The way that the poetry is woven becomes a poem in itself, or at the very least an art of its own. This one experiments with poem-as-mesh. Some others may experiment with choices, other ways of understanding links, and other forms of interactivity.

For now, this is all I can offer. A commitment to a new form of storytelling.