Aesthetic of Video Poetry in Chuma Nwokolo’s “Sudan Sudan” by Al-amin El-nasir

Abstract

Video poetry is an embodiment of literature called 'mediature'. This paper focuses on the new forms of poetry based on virtual reality. This is located in the fields of critical hypothesis, hermeneutics, semiotics, semantics of the text and digital culture. These new forms emerging from the expedition of literature (poetry) and new media are collectively called Digital Poetry. Digital poetry is referred to as E-poetry, short for electronic poetry, meaning a wide range of approaches to poetry that have in common the prominent and crucial use of computers or digital technologies and other devices. This work studies only video poems created to be read on the media accessible online or any video player such as electronic gadget. The paper offers the close-readings of Nwokolo’s “Sudan Sudan”one of numerous video poems available on the internet. This paper has been organized around two deeply interconnected approaches: aesthetic and analytic. The first approach judges the “novelty” of the phenomenon within a historical context. The aesthetic approach that is examined on the corpus is fundamental in order to establish a sort of typology of e-poetry and, consequently, to be able to start the analytic work. The aim of the study is on the one hand to highlight the basic features of video poems in order to make them more approachable and understandable as objects of study; and on the other it is to provide those who are interested in this new area of study with a sort of critical analysis of video poetry.