In 2022, I published my first collection of free verse confessional poetry, The Dust Settles: Grieving through Poetry and Prose. I published the book myself, under my publishing company, Lightning Tower Press, so I was the one who chose the font, the alignment, the format, and the way every single poem appears on each page. I worked on this for months, and every little 
decision (margin size, font size, spacing, etc.) was agonizing. This, I see now, is because I was aware (subconsciously) that rhetoric and communication is always multimodal, as Arola, Ball and Shepherd argue in our Module 2 readings: “Even the font choice is an important but often subtle visual signal to the audience” (4). Everything, even something as simple as a serif font versus a sans serif font, portrays very different tones to the reader, and when I was formatting my own book, I was aware of this somewhere in my brain.
All of this is just to say that I believe all texts are multimodal, and the way a piece of writing appears on a page is incredibly important, especially in poetry where the visual arrangement of words impacts their reading. But this week, after viewing Welcome to Pine Point, I immediately wanted to tell my own multimodal, interactive story with images, interviews, music, and more. I’ve never heard of Pine Point (like a majority of the world, as it existed for one generation), but clicking through its story, I felt nostalgic and sentimental. I think effective multimodality does that. It’s not much like a videogame, and the viewer knows they are not and never were a part of the Pine Point community, and its not unfiction because (as far as I could find on the internet) Pine Point really existed. But there is an element of ARG in its full immersion. Hearing the voices, seeing the faces, reading the stories of this community was very moving. I immediately set out to create my own interactive website just like Welcome to Pine Point (and my final project idea for a grief archive stemmed from this mission), but I found it is a lot harder than I had anticipated. So, for the time being, while I figure out how to use different internet resources, I decided to try something a bit different: I made some of my (already multimodal?) poetry into digital, multimodal videos and images.
Years ago, I got a polaroid camera and my first “test photo” was of the rocks at Wading River beach. I look at this photo often (I have it tucked into my bedroom mirror frame), and I’m always struck by the one rock way out in the water, sticking up out of the water, though barely. 
About a year ago, I wrote a poem about that rock. For this project, I used Canva to superimpose the poem I wrote about the rock directly over the image. I used colors from the image for the text for visual coherence, and I positioned the word “under” directly over the rock the poem was written about in the hopes of pointing it out to readers who may not see the rock. All in all, I wasn’t particularly pleased with this. I felt the image gave the poem some context, perhaps added an element of aesthetic, but it didn’t magnify the emotion of the poem in the same way that the Pine Point website did for me.
So I tried something else. I used a movie maker program, Filmora, to create a sort of slideshow of videos and added a voiceover of me reading some of my poetry. The first I created was “The Infallibility Myth of the Mother”. I wrote this bit of prose for my mom about six months ago, and then I found some videos I already had of her from a Disney trip we went on about two years ago. I thought the videos enhanced the meaning of the video somewhat– they created a more lighthearted tone than the words could have accomplished on their own. But still, I wasn’t happy with the Disney videos. I wanted realer, more authentic clips. So I turned to grief and home videos to create “Death Preceding Denouement”. This one, of the three, felt the realest to me. The clips are real, the emotions in the poetry are real. Including sound in the first video also added a lot (for me, at least) because hearing my dad’s voice has become very powerful and moving since his death six years ago. It’s still no Welcome to Pine Point, but I’m happy with this product and the multimodality of the visuals, sounds, and poem itself– for now.
Gina, your movie poems are heartwrenching and beautiful. Wow! You just kind of snuck them into the post so humbly and quietly that I’m afraid that people may not find or click on them. You have put together something really exquisite here. I can gather that it must feel very risky to share real footage of your family but the effect is striking.
Did you know that Pine Point was a real town? Here is a post shared by one of the creators on an MIT docubase website in 2011. https://docubase.mit.edu/project/welcome-to-pine-point/#:~:text=Inspired%20by%20a%20Pine%20Point,build%20those%20gateways%20to%20memory.
Due to Flash being retired by the major web browsers, the link that I gave you seems to be the only way that one can view Welcome to Pine Point in its nearly original form. It’s not even coming up in website searches anymore. UNIT9 has recorded it as a full length video and posted it on YouTube, but I think a lot of the effect is lost by taking it out of its user manipulated format, which feels like you are looking through a physical scrapbook. The story of Pine Point is that the “town bully” really did exist, was a real person, and he actually did create and maintain a website dedicated to preserving the memory of Pine Point.
I am very excited by the work you’re doing with moving some of your own poetry into multimodal formats. How did you like working with Filmora?
Hi Gina,
It was fantastic to read the process you performed, and I especially appreciate how the goal (ie: “real”) goes beyond aesthetics to address something fundamental to the poetic effect. I find it challenging to talk about multimodality in (digital) poetry, as the distinction between visual-oriented poetry (like concrete poetry or word collage) and standard website design choices is often blurry. This isn’t really the fault of poets, so much as it is a byproduct of the internet; it’s now customary to accompany poems in online lit journals with images, but it’s rarely clear who chooses the images and why. When an image is integrated into a poem, is it done in pursuit of insight (as you’ve done it) or as a concession to the visual needs/expectations of web publishing?
With this said, I’m intrigued by the sensory possibilities of these multimodal combinations and choices. When a writer uses sound to build upon a textual foundation, tonal nuances (such as those present in voice, instrument or ambience) can heavily reframe that text. Just as Bogost suggests that video games communicate their rules and limits via design choices, I imagine the multimodal elements of a digital poem might offer new access points for readers, as each element may contextualize the others and offer a new path through its subtext.
I’d be curious to see if it is possible for multimodal layers to only enhance a piece, rather than changing it in some way. Can an image enhance without changing the reader’s experience of (and interpretation of) a text?
Great post!
-Christopher Munde
Hi Gina,
First, your poetry is sincere and poignant, and a true testament to the beauty you see in the world, as evidenced by the rock poem. My deepest condolences for your dad’s passing, and I honestly cried listening to “Death Preceding Denouement”.
I think taking your poetry from a written form to a more multimodal form like digital poetry was a fantastic way to accentuate your poetry and allow other people to share in it through their senses. Showing your vulnerability by including an interaction between you and your father, as well as one with your mother, is incomparable to just writing because it allows the reader to feel the same emotions you felt when you wrote the poem.
Your blog assisted me in thinking of new ways to teach poetry so students may learn to enjoy it more. By adding music and videos to their poems and possibly posting it online, they can also showcase their poetry in order to reach the masses. I also think your publishing company would benefit by having some of the poems or snippets of the books you publish online (like a sample).
Wonderful job on this post and I look forward to seeing more of your poetry in the future! 🙂
Hello Gina! Your post was wonderful to read, and I really like the idea of multimodal poetry. I agree with you in that there are so many small aspects with writing poetry, or any writing piece for that matter. Sometimes the littlest thing, whether it is the placement of a line, the format of a stanza, what font you chose, or something else, it can make a major difference in how the poem comes across. The topics of your poetry are real, as you discuss, which can be so painful to write about. We as writers go to a happy memory, one that we love, but when the writing is done, sometimes we do not feel the poem is truly real. I have also written about very painful experiences and put them into poetry, and while they feel like a punch in the stomach at times, writing something so real can also be beautiful and have an impact. Lastly, I would like to also point out your use of the picture of the rocks and the poem. This was a wonderful idea, and you pull together such a fantastic piece of multimodal poetry. You have created something so unique. Amazing work!