Personal Experience

This poem “Firefly” has touched me in that the way this poem is mind-blowing.  Deena Larsen unique way of putting words and phrases together is a true work of art.  It’s funny because when I first read this poem, I couldn’t really grasp the reason behind the words in the poem such as green light and flashing quiet glows because I did not know anything about a firefly.  After doing research, I came to find out that a firefly is the same thing as a “lightning bug”.  When I came to the solution to my confusion about what a firefly was, I began to fully understand the poem and really get into the poem.  Because before I did not know about fireflies, it just seemed like a bunch of words put together that had no real meaning or purpose, like the words were randomly put together.  This relates to a lot of the problems I have with a lot of poems and stories.  I see a word that I do not understand or comprehend and I tend to just be reading letters and words rather than getting into the story and what the author is trying to get across. 

After I knew that a firefly was a lightning bug, I read the poem over again and the poem made sense to me, but I still had a question.  The question that came about was I read this poem twice and I still can’t seem to find out why the number 180 was being used in the beginning of the poem when it came to the degrees of separation.  I began to think and dwell on what was the reason for the number of 180 being used.  I kept looking at the description of the poem on the right side of the hypertext that this story was comprised of 6 stanzas, each five lines long, and six lines deep.  This made my mind go in circles.  It took me forever to come up with the fact that 6 multiplied by 5 equals 30 and 30 multiplied by 6 equals 180.  After I figured this out, I began to look into the meaning behind “six lines deep”.  I went back to the story and I read the same first page over again.  I came to realize that you can click on a phrase and another phrase would come up.  I click the first line of the first page one time and then click the next page button and it matched the first line of page two.  This it when it came to me that maybe the phrase of each line being six lines deep could be related to each line on each page.  Sure enough, I was right.  Each line indeed had six different lines that could be used in the poem.  The crazy thing was that after I figured this out, I began to click random lines from page to page and the story would still flow as if I had never clicked the line.  No matter how many times you clicked or no matter which line you clicked, the story would always flow.  This blew my mind.  I could not believe this.  I sat for at least 30 minutes in awe that the story remained the same no matter what order I clicked the lines or how many times I clicked the lines.  This realization sealed the deal for my experience.  This made me really respect her work and respect her as an author because creating a hypertext likes this one takes a lot of time and I respect those that put a lot of effort into what to do and love to do.

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