Generational

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Artist Statement

This interactive poem was created using Twine, an open-source tool for interactive fiction. I was learning to use Twine with my students in a nonlinear storytelling course and immediately began to see the possibilities for poetry. As a form of writing premised on concision, poetry is often revised down to an essence that remains full of echoes, ghosts of former drafts erased from the margins, material that inspired the poem but never made it formally onto the page. Some poems turn out better for the omission of excess material, while other poems lose too much in their whittled-down versions. This poem, based on my childhood experiences at Lake Lanier (outside of Atlanta), fell into the latter category, and while I felt it held an important message, I was struggling to make the poem work in a traditional linear format. Too much of the context and history of the place was left out, just as much of the history of the lake itself had been omitted from my early understanding and experience. I decided to try using Twine to build in the background and history of the place and found this format allowed me to communicate the erasure of this history, as well as the circuitous logic involved in that erasure. The online, branching format allowed me to include documentary photographs, along with some of the questions ghosting the margins of the poem. What emerged was (I hope) a more complete version of the place and my own (mis)understanding of it.

Holly Karapetkova is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in The Southern Review, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, and many other places. Holly’s second book, Towline, won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize and was published by Cloudbank Books.