Whiter Leads the Poem of Forking Paths?
Robert Kendall
Summary
Hyperpoem and hypertext are the new arrivals in the last century with regards to printed texts and poems. Hyperpoem and hypertext are not linear like the conventional printed text. They are carefully planned out by their authors and poets, as to where and when to be linked to other materials. All destinations of the links are unpredictable, with many other linkages within the links.
Readers are free to interpret various meanings out of hypertext and hyperpoem at all times. Authors and poets of hypertext and hyperpoem can choose either to give a set of specific instructions for the reader to follow and interpret or they can leave the ambiguities to the readers to decipher by themselves.
Hypertext system complements the expressive capabilities of natural language by representing the dynamics underlying the words. The final product of the author's emotion and intellectual process are the words. Readers do not create their own texts, rather they take the reins of a creative process, that is uniquely the author's but also no longer belonging to the author alone.
