Today I visited the WWI Poetry Digital Archive, in Second LIfe [SLURL]. The archive is hosted at the University of Oxford, but has been repurposed in Second Life with an encampment and trenches, featuring audio files of the poems, vintage photographs, scans of the poet's compositions in handwriting (including cross-outs and revisions), sentinels, and oral history about various aspects of trench warfare.
Upon arrival you are given the option to be a nurse or a WWI soldier, I picked nurse. After spending some time with the encampment and several poems, including one by Siegfried Sassoon, I proceeded to the trenches, where the transition from real to surreal, in history accomplished by simply walking or driving a few miles towards disaster, is here enabled by a personal balloon, which allows you an aerial view while the general perspective is explained. The soundscape is impressive, distant shots and cries grow louder, you can see explosions, and as you land: rats scurry.
I spent a fair amount of time near Wilfred Owens' Dulce et decorum est which, combined with a soldier's reminiscences of his first experience with mustard gas, grounded the horror of the new technologies of death. As I listened, around me swirled green mist in which words from both reality and poem mixed in a miasma of literalized metaphor. Which, to many accounts, WWI was.
Entrenched, over the top, no man's land; an enhanced sense of irony, a suspicion of sentimentality, and an overrun of euphemism - in many ways, this conflict wrote the world we live in. This installation well worth a visit, and just in time for Veteran's Day.
