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Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 57
Enhancing Relationality through Poetic Engagement with PhoneMe:
Transmodal Contexts and Interpretive Agency
CLAIRE AHN
Queen’s University
NATALIA BALYASNIKOVA
York University
RACHEL HORST
University of British Columbia
KEDRICK JAMES
University of British Columbia
ESTEBAN MORALES
University of British Columbia
YUYA TAKEDA
University of British Columbia
EFFIAM YUNG
University of British Columbia
Abstract
This article explores the role of literary user preference and experience of contextualizing
information in the interpretive responses to poems on PhoneMe, a social media web-
platform and mobile app for place-based spoken word poetry. 137 education students in
three Canadian universities participated by completing a survey that asked them to
choose one of three stylistically distinct poems and subsequently introduced multimodal
contextual information about the poet and location inspiring the poem. Findings indicate
a productive tension between the reader/user’s interpretive agency with typographic text
and the increasing relationality imposed by indexical, transmodal information, thus
helping to update Reader Response theory.
Key Words: Interpretation; Interpretive Agency; Relationality; Place-based Poetry;
Spoken Word; Social Media; User Experience; Context Collapse; Reader Response;
Multimodality; Transmodality; Aesthetic Literacy
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 58
This article presents data from a 14-month study into the affordances of using
PhoneMe, a social media app and web platform for place-based spoken poetry, in multiple
teacher education contexts at three Canadian universities. This research was instigated in
rapid response to COVID 19 pandemic conditions of social distancing, to investigate ways
to counter the effects of social alienation and isolation. These conditions presented an
opportunity to understand how users respond to multimodal poetry online, and how they
connect imagined places and persons to real-world, situated, contextualizing information.
In particular, this paper elaborates on our findings regarding user preferences for poems
using distinct poetic styles and inspired by contrasting North American locations, and on
affective dimensions of user experience when confronted with transmodal and increasingly
situated background information about the poets and the places they chose to write about.
From analysis of both demographic and interpretative-reflective data, we derive a
hypothesis regarding individual agency versus relationality in interpretation of literary
texts. We suggest that the transactional theory of literacy events at the core of reader
response will benefit from a critical lens that takes into account changing patterns of
literacy practices resulting from the popularization of social media and the increasingly
ubiquitous use of mobile devices for daily literacy needs.
PhoneMe reinvigorates the social poetic experience online, incorporating and
commemorating the significance of place-based knowledge and expression through
publishing poems to a global interactive map that features writings, voice recordings, Street
View panoramas, and poet profiles in a democratic, digital, multimodal environment.
PhoneMe is open access and has been implemented in classrooms, teacher education
programs, and community settings (Balyasnikova & James, 2020) since 2016. This study
presents survey data collected from graduate and undergraduate students participating in
PhoneMe workshops in which students completed the survey, engaged in writing place-
based poems, then recorded and published their poems on the PhoneMe interactive map.
The survey data includes demographic information, prior experience writing poetry, user
preference regarding choice of (one of three) poems, reasons for the preference and
favorites line(s) in the poem, reactions to a staged sequence of multimodal contextual
information, and finally information regarding subject area specializations and perceived
value of PhoneMe as a pedagogical tool.
The PhoneMe in COVID Study
In March, 2020, teacher education programs globally were transitioned online
owing to pandemic restrictions on face-to-face instruction. As rapid response research, we
wanted to understand how educators could facilitate creative and social experiences of
poetry using mobile technology. We sought participants who were both practicing and pre-
service teachers (graduate and undergraduate students in faculties of education), and
developed a customized PhoneMe survey to observe aesthetic preferences and the
cumulative effects of transmodal layers of situated, contextualizing information on the
user’s interpretation and appreciation of a poem. In this paper, we analyze the shifting
qualities of participants’ interpretative agency as they experience an increase in
understanding about the context of the poem through a sequenced transmodal assemblage
of relevant information. Reversing the sociological paradigm of context collapse in social
media (Androutsopoulos, 2014; boyd, 2010; Davis and Jurgenson, 2014), we articulate the
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 59
user-experience perspective (Wexler, Yu, and Bridson, 2018) on aesthetic texts and how
increasing contextual knowledge reconfigures interpretation by imposing additional
dialogical relationality. Poetry enables imagination and word association, giving the reader
leeway to make meaning in their own image. Interpretive agency is the hallmark of the
aesthetic stance of a reader’s transaction with a poem. But what occurs when this aesthetic
reading is confronted with multimodal information that urges the reader to change their
perspective, take a more efferent (information seeking) stance, develop a deeper relational
understanding, get a feel for the real person behind the poem? This research falls within a
transliteracies framework (Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2017), because it examines
relationality and interpretative agency from the perspective of readers engaging with
multimodal texts available within the PhoneMe digital environment and what their
experience suggests about the benefit of contextual knowledge for cultivating social
solidarities arising from place-based poetic expression (Pierce, Martin, & Murphy, 2011).
Put another way, what if the breakdown of audience boundaries is not the primary critical
concern, but rather the degree of relationality that the audience is willing to embrace? And
if so, how does relationality map onto our digital literacies from an aesthetic user-
experience perspective?
Theoretical Background
Louise Rosenblatt, in her book The Reader, The Text, The Poem (1978), theorizes the
stance of a reader toward a text in the transaction of meaning on a continuum that ranges
from purely informational (efferent) to literary (aesthetic) stance. The active stance of the
reader in regard to the text influences the interpretive act. Along this continuum, the
reader's responsibility for making meaning increases. If the desire is for practical
information, such as when reading instructions, they might take an efferent stance, and seek
to extract particular information from it. If the desire is for pleasure, contemplation and
self-reflection, they might take a more aesthetic stance as interpreters of texts and in doing
so, exercise interpretive agency in the construction of meaning. Obviously, these are not in
opposition; the reader’s stance is fluid, and shifts within a single reading or over time. This
theoretical understanding sees the interpretation of a poem as a transactional event that
occurs between the reader, the text, and the poet. For efferent reading, “derived from the
Latin, ‘efferre,’ ‘to carry away’ (p. 24) the reader’s interpretive agency lies in their ability
to decide what is relevant or irrelevant to the desired information they wish to retrieve. In
aesthetic reading of literary texts, however, context operates more complexly, “eliciting
experiential responses that may reflect back as well as forward, to create a contextual
ambiance” (p. 85). Rosenblatt describes contextual ambiance as that combination of a
reader’s lived experience with the voice, associations, and implications of a print text; how,
then, does contextual ambience map onto user experience with poetic texts in media-rich
digital environments?
Resulting from the increased volume and speed of information online, some
readers/social media users experience what Pearson (2021) calls “source blindness,”
impacting the extent to which they concern themselves with authors or contexts of
information they encounter, and machine-learning information feeds common to many
social media platforms exacerbate this condition, as the reader no longer requires these
details to search for information. Marvin and Hong (2017) suggest “we must re-think
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 60
agency in rapidly shifting contexts, consider new parameters of time and memory, and
ponder spaces arrayed in new experiential envelopes: as assemblages, as medium, as flows,
as world substratum, as topologically folded and scaled, as networks of actants and
intensities, as heterogeneous imaginaries” (p.3). While much of the theorizing around
context collapse regards producers of content (Costa, 2018; Loh & Walsh, 2021;
Georgakopoulou, 2017), less is understood regarding the audience’s agency as readers,
how they react to additional contextual information, how they adjust their stance toward
the text when shifting from imagined to manifest relational contexts. In light of issues
related to “context collapse” for content producers on social media, whereby
communications may reach well beyond the intended audience, and can often be taken out
of context, reposted, remixed and reused, we sought to understand how PhoneMe might
reverse this trend, and how the limitation of imposed contexts is rendered in the user’s
experience of a literary social media platform. How does enhancing relationality in the
transactional event through contextual assemblages
1
of background information remedy
feelings of isolation, build connections, and augment or diminish the aesthetic experience
of literary texts written by professional and non-professional writers alike?
The data reveals many interesting findings about online reading habits and
processes of interpretation along a semiotic
2
chain of increasingly contextualizing
information. We found that after incorporating layers of relational context, the imagination
of the interpreter of a poetic text experiences a shift in stance and a concomitant shift in
interpretive agency. This experience is both positive (an increasingly relational
understanding, decrease in ambiguity, and appreciation of social connection) and negative
(a decreasing liberty to imagine the poet, poem, and their situated context without real-
world constraints). As one participant explained, “I feel like I understand [the poem] more,
but connect personally with it less because it now feels attached to the author.” Increased
understanding reflects a reduction of ambiguity, but this can also impede imaginative
associations and personal connections integral to the fullness of aesthetic experience.
Methodology
Expanding on a research direction first undertaken by I. A. Richards (1929) leading to
his publication of Practical Criticism, a landmark study for the 20th Century literary studies
movement known as New Criticism which greatly impacted western educational systems,
and augmented to suit learning in 21st Century transmodal, digital, mobile information
environments (Manghi, et al, 2022; Rowsell & Walsh, 2011), our methodology utilizes
purposive sampling, which Creswell (2012) defines as one form of non-random sampling,
to undertake research through design, in which “researchers develop and deploy novel
artifacts, digital or physical, to learn about specific aspects of the human experience” (Dow,
Ju, & Mackay, 2013, p. 267). Convenience sampling also played a role, insofar as we are
all involved in teacher education and, in addition, some of us teach graduate courses in our
1
Our use of "assemblages” as constellations of transmodal, interrelated signifiers with a locus of meaning
draws on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
Generally, assemblage theory purports that agency is located in the relational network of actors creating
meaning (Latour, 2005).
2
Semiotics is the study of sign systems, and a semiotic chain is a process of meaning making in which
meaning is derived from a range of different but linked and related texts.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 61
respective faculties of education. As a curriculum activity suited to a variety of literacy
education courses, we were able to support the rapid transition to online instruction by
providing virtual workshops on the educational use of PhoneMe (Horst, et al, 2022).
Methodologically, we had participants complete the survey prior to giving our
PhoneMe workshop to limit our influence on the data. We designed the research survey
using the concept of transmodality, which examines “the simultaneous co-presence and co-
reliance of language and other semiotic resources in meaning-making, affording each equal
weight. “[Transmodality] highlights the complexity of modes and the entanglements and
relationships between them that shape meaning in multimodal artifacts and
communications” (Hawkins, 2018, p. 64). In the survey, we deliberately foster a chain of
semiosis, in which transmodal shifts catalyze semiotic resources from one mode to the next
(ledema, 2003). We examine the transactional event with poems across discrete modes, as
the reader responds to the theme, idea, or experience of the text in a syncretic interpolation
of modes and a chaining of linked interpretive moments (Alghadeer, 2014). Although we
intentionally break the “transmodal moment” (Newfield, 2014, p. 100) into discrete yet
linked modal resources for the purpose of this study, the result is not merely additive,
meaning one mode does not simply augment the prior interpretation: it can just as easily
create a sense of dissonance, rupture, and tension, and a subsequent revaluation of the
initial textual resource. Sometimes, the modal resource is decidedly antagonistic to the
reader’s overall assemblage of meaning, or creates enough ambiguity to foster questions
and disrupt the sense of closure on the interpretive act. Poetry allows for ambiguity to
become a central tenet of critical reading (Empson, 1966), creating ideal conditions where
the transmodal moment (which Newfield [2014] suggests is metaphoric and of varying
durations) is suspended in a state of inconclusiveness, lacking the closure associated with
efferent modes of semiosis whereby the reader expects to “get” the meaning and in essence
remove it, breaking the chain of semiosis. Instead, poetry pulls the reader back into the text
giving agency to the imagination and fostering personal connections in order to make sense
of the text. As Empson (1966) wrote, “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very
roots of poetry” (p. 3).
Our method was not designed for identifying correct interpretations or the rightness
or wrongness of any given stance in reading a poem, nor are we viewing poetry through
traditional, canonical lenses of literary criticism
3
. Rather we are interested in the changes
the reader experiences as they enact their interpretive agency and their ability to adjust how
they voiced the poem, envisioned its location, and constructed the identity of its author
through a staged encounter with indexical media such as photorealistic panoramas, audio
recordings, and personal biographies. We constructed this survey to help us understand the
3
In 1929, I.A. Richards, one of the leading literary critics credited with New Criticism, which was highly
influential on literary education in the western world, published his study called Practical Criticism. For
this study, Richards worked with his students who offered interpretations of more than a dozen poems
without knowing who the authors were or anything about them. We recognize his study as a (truncated)
precursor to our own. However, Richards was solely concerned with the ability to perform correct
interpretations of poems. We, however, are not concerned with right or wrong interpretations, nor whether
the poem is good or bad according to literary criteria. Instead, we are interested in how interpretation
changes with additional layers of contextual information.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 62
nature of these changes in the reader’s stance by structuring the process of textual
engagement so that it begins with a literary text (compelling an aesthetic stance from the
reader) and then staging additional layers of transmodal, situated, real-world information
(Murphy, 2012). Users of both the PhoneMe web interface and now the PhoneMe app
simultaneously encounter these modes of information, making the survey’s transmodal
sequencing artificial; however, when composing poems in the app, the “create” flow
follows the same sequence of typing, recording, choosing a location and image, tagging,
and publishing. After designing our survey and receiving research ethics approval, we
began providing workshops for graduate and undergraduate Education courses at three
Canadian universities. Instructors introduced the study and students were encouraged to
complete the consent form, the survey, and familiarize themselves with the PhoneMe
platform during the week prior to the workshop. Although all students were invited to
participate in the survey and workshops, data was only collected from those who answered
Yes to the first survey question regarding voluntary consent to use their data for research
purposes.
Participants: “The User/Reader”
The 137 consenting participants of this study were recruited over a 14-month period
(May, 2020 - July, 2021) in several different contexts: The first group were post-practicum
teacher candidates in the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Bachelor of Education
Secondary Teacher Education Program with many different subject area specializations;
the second group were pre-practicum secondary teacher candidates enrolled in an English
Language Arts methods course, also at UBC; the third group were secondary teacher
candidates in an English Language Arts methods course at Queen’s University; the fourth
group were graduate students enrolled in an Adult Education course at York University;
and the fifth group were education graduate students in a digital research methods course
at UBC. Although people may encounter poetry through popular culture on a daily basis,
close reading of poetry is typically associated with schooling in many western countries,
and therefore teachers play a central role in how poetry is understood and received. Given
our aim is to study aesthetic literacies in the digital domain and also to promote the use of
poetry as a way to create meaningful social connection during times of social distancing,
our sample frame focused on preservice and practicing teachers. While many have a
specialization in teaching English Language Arts, we broadened the sample to include
participants specializing in other disciplines and practicing in non-formal, community
learning environments. Participants ranged from 21 to 50 years of age, with the majority
in their twenties and early thirties (see Figure 1). Other demographic information was
collected regarding gender identity, subject area specialization, prior experience writing
poetry, and COVID specific information such as number of people in the participants’
bubbles (number of people with whom they had continual contact during social isolation).
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 63
Figure 1. Ages of consenting participants
The Survey Instrument
The “PhoneMe in COVID” survey is structured so that it can be completed in 20-30
minutes. After introducing the study and providing the consent form, it asks participants to
share some demographic information. It then presents three poems (more details about the
poems in the next section) and asks the user to choose one and reflect on the reason for that
choice. In a staged sequence, the user is then introduced and responds to three additional
layers of contextualizing information: (1) listening to a recording of the poet reading their
poem while (2) exploring related Google Street View panorama of the location the poet is
writing about and then (3) reading the poet’s autobiographical profile statement. Finally,
the user reflects on their own COVID experience and potential curriculum applications of
this kind of mobile, place-based poetry from the perspective of their roles as subject area
teachers.
The Text[s]: Three Poems, Four Modes
The PhoneMe platform intentionally creates a horizontal relationality between the
reader and the text, situating the reader within an ethos that recognizes the significance of
voice, place, and person (as writer) in the transaction of meaning. We take up Rosenblatt’s
(1978) transactional approach to the poem as one that “does not permit honorific use of the
terms ‘literary work of art’ or ‘literature’…. We can thus leave open the evaluative question
of whether the transaction has produced a poor or a good literary work of art” (p. 155). In
the survey, three poems are introduced to the reader in the following way: “We asked three
poets to respond to their experience of place during the COVID-19 pandemic in poetry.
These are the poems they came up with.” In this way, at the outset of the survey, the reader
is introduced to the poet as situated in the world, in the contemporary pandemic moment –
one the reader knows and shares intimately – and the poem is a response, something that
was created for this particular context. This foregrounding and augmentation of the real-
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 64
world context of a poem and poet alters the reader’s stance as interpreters, and instantiates
relationality from the outset of the transaction of meaning.
The three selected poets who wrote place-based poems from the situated context of
their pandemic experience and posted them on PhoneMe for use in this study are of
different identities, ages, and backgrounds. They have different poetic styles and prior
involvements with poetry. In Figure 2, we present the three poems participants were asked
to choose between (here shown side-by-side, not sequentially as they appeared to
participants taking the survey).
Differences between the poems are quite apparent, for example, the locations inspiring
the poems starkly contrast: Vi’s poem relates being surrounded by the ocean in a remote
setting on Canada’s northwest coast, whereas Lyre writes about his apartment in downtown
Toronto, Canada’s largest metropolis, the urbanity of which is shared by Amber’s poem
which is set in Nashville, USA, where she, as a Canadian, was spending a year as a visiting
scholar. Furthermore, Vi writes about connecting with nature and the primal energy of
water without going into political implications to do with water as a resource. This is in
Figure 2. PhoneMe survey poems
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 65
contrast to Amber’s poem which explores the political activities taking place in Nashville
and presents a context of sociopolitical concerns arising around the pandemic. Her poem
is outward looking, which contrasts with Lyre’s poem which is introspective about the
pandemic and its effect on his state of mind and quality of life.
We felt that each of these poems expressed some very personal ways of relating to
the world in the grip of a pandemic yet each is distinctly conditioned by the setting in which
the poet is living. The remoteness of Vi’s location seems to mitigate the day-to-day impact
of social distancing as she remains in contact with the natural environment. Social isolation
is dramatically felt by the youngest poet Lyre, who experiences a loneliness which is not
ameliorated by the environment he is situated within. Amber clearly processes her
experience from a more abstract and political framework as an outsider reflecting on her
environment from a more critical, even parodic perspective. In terms of style, Amber’s
poem embraces complex word play, Lyre’s is suggestive of rhythm and has a humorous,
self-effacing, lyrical quality to it, while Vi’s poem speaks directly from the heart without
ornament or elaboration from the key point she articulates. The poems may be interpreted
in various ways, but the tone suggests that Vi’s is more spiritual, Amber’s is more political,
and Lyre’s is more introspective. This difference is borne out through pronoun usage,
verbal constructions, generic versus concrete nouns, how the poem addresses the reader,
and so on. While each poem generically shares a temporal context (COVID-19),
exemplifies place-based poetry, and was written for a common purpose, the differences
outweigh these commonalities. Hence, there are enough explicit and implicit differences
to shed light on user preferences when engaging with poetic texts online. In order to avoid
placement bias (i.e. participants selecting the first poem of the three and not reading the
others) we rotated the order of poems each time we engaged a new group of participants.
Table 1 summarizes these differences and provides detailed comparisons of the three
poems according to their form, content, style, vocal performance, location image, and
biographical details.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 66
Table 1. Four accumulative texts in the transmodal poetic experience
First Text: The Poem
Title
Water
We Volunteer
Catch Me
Word
number :
character
number
58 : 231
228 : 1065
294 : 1279
Average
word length
3.9
4.6
4.3
Words in
lines
Min: 1
Max: 6
Average: 3.6
Min: 1
Max: 14
Average: 6.9
Min: 4
Max: 10
Average: 7
Rhyme and
rhythm
Repetition of phrases
Internal rhymes and assonance
Rhyme scheme
Place
• A remote setting on Canada’s
northwest coast
• Urban Nashville
• Urban Toronto
Poet’s’
connection to
place
• This has become Vi’s home
after years of moving around.
She has made a life here and
settled down. She is deeply
connected to the land.
• Amber is a visitor. There is a sense that
she is a stranger in this place.
• Lyre is a visitor to
Toronto, but has
made a connection
with the place that
has lasted.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 67
COVID
experience
• Remoteness of the location
might mitigate the day to day
impact of social distancing as
she remains in contact with
the natural environment and
her partner
• Abstract and political framework as an
outsider looking at the world from a
more removed, critical perspective
• Feelings of being
isolated and trapped
in interior spaces
Tone
• Naturalistic, emotive,
devotional
• Critical, political, cynical, ironic
• Introspective, witty,
sardonic
Topic
• Connecting with nature and
the primal energy of water
• Inspired by political events in Nashville
around COVID
• Personal struggles
with identity crisis
General
• Generality of metaphors
• Conceptual/ spiritual
• Materiality, political, specific objects
• Interior
psychological,
angsty, subjective
Second text (audio recording): The performance
Quality of
recording
• Some voice recorder
distortion
• Noise and distortion in
recording
• Good quality of recording creates
a sense of warmth
Background
noise
• Sounds like she is standing
outside
• Bad phone connection,
creates a sense of
disconnection
• Ambient vehicle sounds added
by poet for effect
• Speakers passing by
Poetic
performance
• Humour, slight laughter
• Breath and slow pacing
• Lower tone of voice
• Intimate joy
• Quickly paced, breathless
• Assertive and high tone of
voice
• Cynical irony
• Self reflexive humour
enjoying the word play
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 68
Third text (image): Google street view of the place of poem
The Image
Content of
image
• Looking down over a dock in
Bella Bella
• Community garden project in
the foreground
• Empty community roads
• Large white silos to the left
• Calm ocean and mountain
scape in the background
• Looking up at sun cresting
over government building
• The large building takes up
the entire view
• The building is imposing,
prisonlike
• Toronto’s distinctive CNN
tower is near centre frame
• City skyline fringes lower edge
of image
• Most of the image is full of
altocumulus clouds and blue sky
Degree of
alignment to
the poem
• This image is taken in town
whereas the location of the
poem is off the grid and
surrounded by ocean with no
evidence of human-made
environment
• Very aligned to
content/context of poem.
• Exterior, urban,
political/government
• Distinctive Toronto skyline,
however poem takes place
indoors
• The view is of the sky and not
the streets - this reflects the
interiority and personal
perspective of the poem
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 69
Fourth text (written): The biographical statement
Age*
Early fifties
Mid thirties
Mid twenties
Cultural
background*
Indigenous, originally from the
Yukon
White settler Canadian
South Asian
Profession
High school teacher
Academic
Computer science student
Connection
to place
• Deep almost spiritual
connection to place, sense of
home and belonging
• Poet as visitor/stranger in
different political
environment
• Place as a part of development
of poet’s interior psychology
and journey
Personal
history
shared
• Shares her long journey to
find home
• Less personal history
shared
• Family history and context
Covid
context
• Less foregrounded due to
remoteness of the
environment
• Connection to land and her
lover
• A political reality
• Frustration and bitterness
• A psychological experience
• Isolation and disconnection
* Some data presented in this table was not included in the poets’ biographical statements but is known to the researchers and
relevant to understanding the different perspectives represented in the poems.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 70
After selecting a poem, offering reasons for the choice, and selecting a favorite line,
participants were introduced to transmodal contextualizing information about that poem
only.
Aesthetic Choice and User Preference
Overall, the most frequently chosen poem was “Catch Me” (45.2%, n=61), followed
by “Water” (31.9%, n=42), and “We Volunteer” (23.0%, n=31). Table 2 shows a detailed
depiction of the demographic distributions of the people who choose the different poems –
including age, group, area of study, and number of poems written in the last year, five years,
and in their lifetime. Most notably, our analysis of the data shows that poem choice is
closely related to the average age of participants who chose that specific poem. Indeed,
overriding all other factors that might influence their choices, such as poem length, style,
and content and topical location, we found that participants tended to choose the poem by
the poet closest to them in age, even before knowing anything about the poet's age or
identity. This single finding stands out in several ways: it occurs at a meta-level of
interpretation, responding to a nexus of related factors, and purports that readers intuit a
great deal about writers from the tone of a text, and that implicit factors in language use
significantly influence aesthetic preferences. As Rosenblatt (1978) describes, “tone is
located in no specific element of the poem; it arises from diction, images, figures of speech,
structure, even rhymes and meter—in short, from the whole.... in the reader's weaving his
responses to all of these cues into an attitude, a voice, that can be named 'the tone' of the
work, and that enter into 'the meaning'" (p. 96). Beyond age, other factors influencing poem
choice included the subject specialization as educators (where Trades teachers
predominantly preferred “Water”, all others favoring “Catch Me, Outside”) and, similarly,
number of poems written in the participant’s lifetime (where those with no prior experience
writing poetry chose “Water” or “We Volunteer”). Results were fairly consistent across the
three institutions.
Table 2. Distribution of demographics by the selection of poems. Green indicates high
frequency, yellow indicates medium frequency, and red indicates low frequency.
Demographic
Categories
We volunteer
Poet’s Age:
mid thirties
Water
Poet’s Age:
mid fifties
Catch Me
Poet’s Age:
mid twenties
Age
20-25 (n=79)
16.50%
32.90%
50.60%
26-30 (n=30)
36.70%
23.30%
40.00%
31-35 (n=11)
54.50%
27.30%
18.20%
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 71
36-40 (n=8)
12.50%
37.50%
50.00%
41-45 (n=4)
0.00%
25.00%
75.00%
46-50 (n=3)
0.00%
100.00%
0.00%
Group
UBC (n=86)
24.40%
32.60%
43.00%
Queens (n=35)
20.00%
25.70%
54.30%
York (n=14)
21.40%
42.90%
35.70%
Teaching Subject
Drama &
English (n=53)
26.40%
22.60%
50.90%
Social sciences
(n=35)
25.70%
34.30%
40.00%
Other languages
(n=23)
26.10%
26.10%
47.80%
Science (n=28)
17.90%
35.70%
46.40%
Trades (n=11)
0.00%
54.50%
45.50%
Education
(n=12)
25.00%
41.70%
33.30%
Fine arts (n=20)
15.00%
30.00%
55.00%
Poem written in
your life
None (n=3)
33.30%
66.70%
0.00%
One (n=3)
0.00%
33.30%
66.70%
Several (n=57)
15.80%
31.60%
52.60%
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 72
Dozens (n=41)
24.40%
31.70%
43.90%
Too many to
count (n=31)
35.50%
29.00%
35.50%
After selecting a preferred poem, the survey asked participants to identify reasons
for their choice, prompting them to rank four options with an additional open-ended option
to explain other reasons for their selection. Overall, most participants selected aesthetic
properties as their first choice across all poems (38.5% n=52), followed closely by
connection to the content or issue discussed by the poem (35.6%, n=48), while fewer chose
individual experience of COVID-19 (11.1%, n=15), or shared connection with the place
(9.6%, n=13). Only 5.2% (n=7) of participants entered other as the most important factor
influencing their choice. Written answers to the other category include "It is short and
sweet" [Water], "Most well-written and witty" [We Volunteer], and "It's clever and tongue
and cheek" [Catch me]. Furthermore, when results are disaggregated by poem choice, some
differences are made visible—as shown by Figure 3. In “We Volunteer”, for example,
people were equally influenced by the aesthetic qualities and the connection to the place
(35.5%). In the poem “Water”, however, participants were mainly influenced by its
aesthetic qualities (48.8%). Finally, in the poem “Catch Me”, participants claimed to be
influenced mainly by a connection to the content or issue discussed by the poem (47.5%).
We interpret the selection of aesthetic properties to suggest the stance the reader is
taking is about literary engagement, whereas appreciating the content or issue, as well as a
shared context, implies more efferent and relational stances toward the transactional event
which the poem instantiated.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 73
Figure 3. Distribution of participants’ reasons for their poem choice
Transmodality and Links in the Semiotic Chain
PhoneMe invites users to engage with poetry as a mobile, multimodal genre, where
meanings are expressed through the semiotic ensemble of written texts, recordings of oral
performances, Street View panoramas, pinned on an interactive global map. The user is
able to search for poems textually or topographically, and to explore a poet’s biography.
However, emphasis is placed on listening as a crucial mode of transliterate engagement
with poetry. As Newfield and D’Abdon (2015) state, “conceiving of a performed or spoken
poem as a multimodal ensemble implies looking at the articulation of a poem’s meaning
through its orchestration of different, culturally shaped modes and media” (p. 522);
different modalities create new dynamism and complexity of poetic meaning-making in
digital environments (Aghadeer, 2014). In order to foreground the interactions of different
modes when using PhoneMe, our survey deliberately requested responses to the different
modes in sequence.
Although our presentation of different modes was made possible by the paradigm
of multi-modality (i.e., treatment of different modes as distinct from one another), our
findings contribute to the discussion of trans-modality. In transmodality, referring to
Streeck and Kallmeyer (1999), Murphy (2012) states that “[modes] do not just supplement
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 74
each other in relationships of mutual support, they sequentially perforate and
interpenetrate each other, acquiring a certain co-morbid resemblance” (p. 1969). Through
perforation and interpenetration, modes modulate, mutate, and amplify one another. As we
discuss below, the written texts, audio recording, Street View image, and author’s
biography interpenetrated one another and transformed the interpretation of “earlier”
modes.
a) The three voices. Participants were simultaneously presented with two modes, an
audio recording of their selected poem performed by the author and a Street View image.
First they were asked to respond to the voice recording, which provides an intimate
relationality to the text. Participants responded to hearing the voice of the poet in various
ways, from appreciating the intimacy of the poet’s voice to feeling that their vocal
presence was almost too close for comfort. Some participants remarked that they
imagined the poem with different voicing, and that interest waned upon hearing the
poet’s own vocal rendition. This was most common with the most frequently selected
poem, “Catch Me Outside” by Lyre – some participants expected a more rhythmic rap-
style vocal delivery. Overall, more users (54.7%, n=75) felt that the audio recording
helped them get a better sense of the author's personality in the poem, while 44.5%
(n=61) said that it made them feel more connected to the place they were speaking about,
and 43.0% (n=59) noted that the audio recording made them empathize more with the
poet's feelings. Only 17% (n=23) of participants added their own written responses to the
audio recording, including comments that denoted either an adverse reaction (e.g., "the
voice reading detracted from my interest in the poem") or further elaborating on their
response (e.g., “I feel like I know the author”).
Following Rosenblatt (1978), a poem read aloud offers “many nonverbal cues to
the listener, for example, through emphasis, pitch, inflection, rhythm” (p. 20). These cues
will not be uniform and are highly situated and embodied; likewise participant responses
depended on the manner in which the poem was read aloud. It is unsurprising that the three
recordings also have significant differences that result from their distinct speech habits and
the use of technology. As shown in Figure 4, participants' responses to the audio recordings
varied according to each poet. In the poem “Water”, reactions to the performance leaned
towards a better connection to the place that was referenced. In both “We Volunteer'' and
“Catch Me Outside” on the other hand, participants most often got a better sense of the
poet's personality.
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 75
Figure 4. Distribution of participants’ responses to the audio recording of the poems
While the cues provided by the poet's voice offer participants situated context clues
as well as increasing relationality, the way readers react to the imposition of new
interpretive barriers to a poem-already-read is full of possibilities. Indeed, as noted by
Rosenblatt, “a specific reader and a specific text at a specific time and place: change any
of these, and there occurs a different circuit, a different event—a different poem” (p. 14).
The way this “different poem” collapses against the initial interpretation was elaborated in
participants’ open-ended responses to the audio recording. For example, Vi's audio was
recorded with the microphone close to her mouth, giving the listener an intimate sense of
her breath and tonal resonances as she speaks. Such intimacy caused some participants to
feel "super uncomfortable" or that "it destroied [sic] my feeling of the poem." In “Catch
Me, Outside”, the main concern was around the assumptions about the poem’s rhythm, as
noted by a participant: "I read it very differently, as kind of a rap." Finally, in “We
Volunteer”, there was only one open-ended response, which indicated a decoupling of
participants’ view of the poem/the poet and the way it was performed: “The way she read
the poem and her voice was completely different than I had imagined, and it actually made
me like the poem less. I did feel more connected to the place and the person's personality,
I just... didn't like the personality I heard?”
b) The three locations. Simultaneously, the survey introduces a poet-selected
Google Street View image related to the location which inspired their poem.
Google Street View offers users a photographic 360 degree panorama from a
movable, road-located point of view, complete with coordinates and address/place
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 76
name. Photography has historically been used indexically to document real places
and events (Ball, 2017), and despite the ease with which digital photographs can
be modified, semiotically, Street View provides a realistic, consensual, immersive
point of view on an actual place. This shifts the reader’s localization of the text
from an imagined space to a specific place on a shared map that the reader also
inhabits. Google Street View does have some serious limitations, however, given
that these panoramas are 1) perforce restricted to ground-level, outside
viewpoints, [even though Lyre’s “Catch Me, Outside” poem was written about
being cooped up in an apartment because of COVID]; 2) restricted to accessible,
public road viewpoints, [presenting a deeply contradictory image for Vi’s poem,
since the closest Street View comes to her remote, wilderness island home is the
industrial-looking port and ferry dock of Bella Bella, BC]; and, 3) photographed
in the daytime, whereas the reader might imagine a more nocturnal setting. To
overcome these limitations, the PhoneMe app now provides the ability for users to
upload their own place-based photographs. Nonetheless, the framing of
imagination within photorealistic representations of specific places impacts the
imagined space that the poem conjures for readers. Figure 5 compares responses
to seeing the Street View panorama: for each poem over 70% of participants
responded that the image changed how they envisioned the location.
Figure 5. Percent change of envisioned location after seeing Street View panorama
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 77
c) The three poets. Subsequently, participants were introduced to short
biographical descriptions of each poet, provided by the poets themselves, implicating
another complex layer of contextual background information—thus situating the
experience of reading in a more intimate event of relationship with a real person. One of
the most common responses to reading a poet’s bio was finding a relational connection
between the poem and the poets' identities, which in turn informed participants'
interpretations of the poems. For example, after reading Lyre’s bio, a participant noted
that "You get to understand where they are from, their identity and how it plays in writing
their poem." Participants also gained a more general sense of the circumstances
surrounding the poet and their poem, such as a respondent who appreciated the socio-
political background information for their reading of Amber's poem “We Volunteer”
from her bio: "I did not know what was really happening in Tennessee during this time
especially about the protesting. I think reading her bio made the poem make more sense
and put into perspective that she was furious and frustrated." Responses also illustrate
how some participants have a stronger aesthetic connection to the poems due to the
authors' bio, as argued by a respondent who said that reading Vi's bio "makes [the poem]
even more beautiful."
Some reactions to the poet's biographical information articulated how this new
information changed participants' interpretation of the poem. For instance, some
participants argued that the biographical information created a distance from their imagined
authors: "I had a feeling that the voice was from someone older" [response to Lyre's poem].
Conversely, others argued that it transformed how they imagined poets' connection to the
places discussed in the poem, and highlighted how identity is influenced by place-based
affiliation: "this author feels that home is BC, whereas that landscape of Toronto felt like
home to me. I did not realize that part of this author's struggle was the result of the place
that I call home." Finally, some argued that the poets' biographical information changed
how they experienced the text, thus reverberating along the entire semiotic chain, as
illustrated by a participant who read Lyre's biography and said that "it changes the tone in
which I read the poem."
Knowing more about the authors provided further limitations on the possibilities of
interpretations of the poem, urging participants to either empathize more with the texts
(especially in the cases where the new information matched their previous interpretation)
or to relationally reorient themselves in order to integrate the new information. Such
reorientation was expressed by a participant who chose Vi's poem, "I gain more personal
distance as the first time I read the poem I really read it through the lens of my own
experience. I feel closer to the author's voice, however, and it feels more like a conversation
with them about the situation and I can compare my different (but similar) experiences."
This dialogical relationality underscores an important ethical dimension which literacy
events implicate for social cohesion and connection at a distance through an online
discursive environment. Additionally, biographies provided information that caused
participants to reevaluate previous responses to either the typed poems or the additional
modalities that were introduced in the survey. For example, a participant who reacted
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 78
negatively to Amber's audio recording noted that reading the poet’s bio created a desire to
retract their previous comment: "Well now I feel bad that I said I didn't like her personality.
I am now understanding where this author is coming from a little more. She put on the
Tennessee twang to make a point. It is more a criticism of the social constructs around her."
Findings: Change in Interpretation
This study explores the changes that take place in the reader’s interpretation and
experience of a poem - within a process of expanding transmodal and “contextual ambiance”
(Rosenblatt 1978, p. 85). These changes are not linear; for the user they are experienced as
recursive retrofitting of prior schemas, the process being dialogical and emergent.
Increasing the authenticity of place and person augments, highlights, disrupts, even
replaces the imagined. Describing the experience of change in interpretation, participants
provided rich sensory and metaphorical language to analyze. In our survey, each link in the
semiotic chain grounds the imagination with points of real-world relation. Agency on the
part of the user shifts in tandem with shifts in the reader's stance toward the text, which in
turn shifts according to additional layers of contextual information orienting the reader not
only to a particular place but to the personality of the author. The connection to place
enhances the relational construct (Pierce, Martin, & Murphy, 2011). In examining the kinds
of changes readers reported as they encountered the series of transmodal texts, only 8 of
137 participants reported that they felt no change at all. 43 participants experienced a
change, but did not indicate which type of change it was. Of those who described the quality
of the change, we identified three distinct types: Increase, Decrease, and Clarification.
Increase (in relationality): The predominant change reported among participants
(87 of 137 or 64%) was an increase in connection, either to the poet themselves, the content
of the poem, or the sense of place in the poem. The vocabulary used to describe this
increase includes phrases such as: “Resonates more strongly,” “easier to relate,” “feel more
personally connected to the poet,” “words hit deeper,” “connected to the author,” “It
humanizes the poem, makes it less constructed,” “added layers”. This deepening and
enriching of the poetic experience via interpolated modalities and poetic context is
expressed in visceral terms, and speaks to the creative and pedagogical significance of
PhoneMe as an environment where readers can encounter poems in a more socially
embedded and emplaced way, and can mediate their own aesthetic-efferent reading
preferences and stances as a negotiation between their agency as interpreters and the payoff
of developing more relational and dialogically responsive understanding.
Decrease (in agency): While only a minority of participants (17 of 137 or 12%)
reported a decrease in agency, the intensity of the change was significant. Participants used
phrases such as, “destroyed my feeling,” “ruined the poem,” “disconnected from the place,”
“empathy is diminished,” “it makes it less about me and more about them.” This decrease
in connection personalizes the loss of interpretive agency with the addition of ‘real world’
contextualizing information. Whereas an aesthetic reading of the poem is an invitation to
personally inhabit the text, the additional relational constraints on meaning gradually
pushed these readers outside the poem. As one participant explained, “This prevents me
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 79
from appropriated [sic] the poem into my own experiences and life.” As we have discussed
above, poetry asks the reader to engage aesthetically, to open up to feeling, to meet the
author within the text and to collaborate in production of meaning and the literary
experience. The text is a kind of window upon which the reader may see reflections of
themselves as well as offering a viewpoint into the circumstances of the poet. Resisting the
loss of agency in interpretation is like defending one’s right to dream, and the indexical
authenticity of recorded audio and photographic media might function like an eviction
notice if one is attached to their prior interpretation.
Clarification: The final change category of clarification describes a similar
materialization from aesthetic and imaginative possibility to efferent and concrete actuality.
34 participants (25%) experienced the additional information as a clarification of the
meaning of the poem. Ambiguity was reduced due to an increase in information about the
poem, but for these participants, the clarification was not experienced with negative affect.
Clarification did not distance the reader from the poem. Participants used phrases such as:
“Helps you visualize,” “Makes you understand,” “I get a sense of exactly where the author
is speaking from,” “Helped concretely materialize the image in my head,” “Better
understanding of the true sense of the emotions,” “Now I know,” “I now understand,”
“Makes the poem seem more tangible.” This category of change foregrounds how many
readers’ sense of poetic enjoyment and understanding can be increased with additional
contextual information and concretizing modalities.
Discussion: Implications for Poetry as Social Media Discourse
The genre of poetry in typographic form calls upon the reader to supply a fullness of
affective resonation, personal context, history, and associative meanings to the reading
event to enliven the experience. As such, poetry perhaps more than any other literary
artform, is an invitation to open up to the richness of interiority and the reader’s “readiness
to think and feel” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 88) rather than seeking one correct meaning that
resides within the given text alone. In this study we explored the transmodal poetic
experience that PhoneMe offers, one in which the poem is extended by contextualizing
information and multimodal texts that are layered into a synesthetic experience of the
poem’s connection to a shared world. A tension exists that centers on the agency of readers
to inhabit their own interpretative viewpoints and the depth to which interpretation must
uphold a dialogical, ethical relationality and responsibility (Murray, 2000). Such
relationality begins tacitly through the reader’s selection of texts, which we observed was
strongly correlated to the age of the writer, yet relationality becomes more complex as
context becomes more explicit. As one participant described, “Knowing more about the
author makes me feel closer and further from the poem. It changes the weight of certain
words and their meaning or association. I want to know more, whereas when just reading
the poem, it could stay as an anonymous poem. Now our interpretations of the chosen
words are intermingling.” The initial anonymity of the poem allows the reader to fully
inhabit and appropriate the text into their own narrative. But as the reader takes in efferent,
real-world information about the life and place of the author, an underlying change occurs
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 80
in the relationality between the reader and the text. The text is pulled away from the reader
and poetic ambiguity is reduced via the concretizing visual and auditory modalities. As
Rosenblatt explained, “[T]he reader has to learn to handle his multiple responses to texts
in a variety of complex ways, moving the center of attention toward the efferent or aesthetic
ends of the spectrum” (p. 36). In PhoneMe, the poem exists as both an aesthetic work as
well as an efferent documentation of the poet’s experience of a place in a shared world.
This reduction of ambiguity, however, may strengthen the reader’s affective connection
with the poem, the place, the content, and the poet themselves. By doing so, we posit that
PhoneMe poetry can foster a deeper sense of connection both to one’s own lifeworld, and
to the places and persons that cohabit this planet.
This study increases our understanding of how educators engage with and connect
to transmodal poetic texts while offering a pedagogical platform that can be taken up in
future classrooms in the promotion of place-based and digitally enriched/enriching forms
of poetic expression. PhoneMe promotes an urgent educational imperative to diversify the
canon, offering educators and their students a poetic heteroglossia of writing by peers,
persons of many different cultures, ages, races, abilities, and languages. Poetic engagement
can happen across the curriculum; many non-English specializing participants of this study
came up with novel ideas to incorporate PhoneMe in curricula from science to mathematics,
as a way to gain a deeper appreciation and personal connection to the meaningful places
and sounds associated with diverse subject matter. Given the massive and technologically
mediated changes taking place to literacy practices almost daily, a new more relevant,
networked, and transmodal approach to poetry pedagogy is called for. This research and
pedagogical intervention promotes poetry as a relationally enriching event; one in which
many meanings - relational, situated, contextual, and deeply imaginative - can exist and
commingle together in the same place. If teachers are to engage young people in caring
about poetry, they will benefit from finding ways to help their student engage with
contemporary texts that literally and figurative speak to their lived and imagined
experiences.
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Author Biographies
Claire Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Multiliteracies in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s
University. Claire is interested in how information is mediated across different platforms and
how this informs our understanding about events, issues, and people. Claire is also interested in
genre studies as a way to support media literacy education.
Natalia Balyasnikova is an Assistant Professor in Adult Education (Faculty of Education, York
University). As a community-engaged researcher, Natalia works with older immigrants in large
urban contexts to understand factors that impact learning trajectories in later life. In her
interdisciplinary work Natalia employs creative research methods, namely found poetry and
multimodal storytelling.
Rachel Horst is a PhD candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the
University of British Columbia. She is interested in digital literacies, futures literacies, and
Language and Literacy Volume 25, Issue 2, 2023 Page 83
narrative futuring for cultivating the future(s) imaginary. Her work engages digital arts-based
methodologies for investigating the futuring potential of qualitative research.
Kedrick James is a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the
University of British Columbia. As Director of the Digital Literacy Centre, he developed
innovative educational technologies, including PhoneMe, a social media network for place-based
spoken poetry, and Singling, a unique text sonfication software. He specializes in automation of
literacy, community-responsive discourse ecologies, language arts in teacher education, creative
inquiry, and public engagement.
Esteban Morales is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of British
Columbia (Canada). His research interests are focused on the intersection between
transformative learning, social media, and peace. His work explores how people in Colombia
experience social media violence in their everyday lives.
Yuya Takeda is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Language and Literacy Education at
University of British Columbia. His research interests include philosophy of education, critical
media literacy, conspiracy theories, and discourse studies. Please visit yuyapecotakeda.com for
more information about his work.
Effiam Yung is employed at the Department of Language & Literacy Education in the Faculty
of Education, UBC in the role of Web Communications Specialist. He works closely with the
Digital Literacy Centre team where their interest in technology and digital media aligns with his.
