I ♥ E-Poetry

This is a link to a special collection of previously unpublished electronic literature, guest edited by Scott Rettberg, Juan Pablo Plata, and myself.

This dossier is collection of previously unpublished e-lit, with editorial statements, and an essay on Ana María Uribe.

Share and enjoy!

In preparation for its next stage of development, this blog is moving to a new URL and platform, as described below.

The shift in domain name from leonardoflores.net to iloveepoetry.com represents two things:

• A broadening of the project’s concept from an individual’s performance to many individual performances. In its first stage, the “I” in the title meant me, Leonardo Flores. In the upcoming stage, the “I” will include guest writers, who will also “♥” e-poetry.
• One of the goals for the initial stage in the project was to establish my voice and identity in the e-lit and DH communities through this daily blog. Now that I’ve done so, I’m interested in cultivating my identity beyond this project, so I’m freeing my name to relaunch my professional blog (coming soon— summer project).

The platform shift from Tumblr to Wordpress is due to the following:

• Tumblr is cool and social, but too limiting in the tools it offers. It was fine for a single-author blog, but not for the plans I have for this project.
• Wordpress has developed into a robust content management system, extensible, and oh-so customizable. This is a fitting tool for the next stage of this project.

This site will continue to host I ♥ E-Poetry, including re-posting new entries.

But sometime in July, it will start to change to accomodate its new broader functions. You will still be able to get your I ♥ E-Poetry content through this site, but the main project will be hosted at ILoveE-Poetry.com.

Thank you for your readership and support!

This Twitter bot has has been designed to automatically post an I ♥ E-Poetry entry every hour at the 1/2 hour mark. If you’re interested in exploring other works reviewed or reliving the excitement (!!!) of each entry, then this is the account to follow. It should take this bot about 21 days to tweet the whole project— which is just right for my current needs.

After 500 consecutive days of reading and writing about e-poetry, I’m taking a much-needed break.

But no worries, this is far from over. This is simply a pause before embarking upon the next stage of this project. In the meantime, I’ll be conducting some assessment, redesigning some aspects of the blog, migrating it to a new site, integrating it with the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, inviting guest entries, and more.

See you in three weeks!

This word-frequency visualization is generated from the 100 most commonly used words in the first 500 consecutive daily entries of this scholarly blogging project.

Launched on December 19, 2011, I have been writing this blog every day, without fail, until today. That means I have written over 141,000 words— the equivalent of 564 pages of pure text (at 250 words per page), more if you count all the images.

Since its launch, I’ve had the honor to welcome 9,788 unique visitors from around the world in 15,875 visits, with 31,434 pageviews according to Google Analytics data. I ♥ E-Poetry has received about 61.66% new visitors since its launch, which means the project has enjoyed a steadily growing readership and new audience.

Thank you, my readers!

Also, my emphatic thanks to

• My Editorial Board— Alan Bigelow, Kathi Inman Berens, and Mark C. Marino— for your support and guidance on this project.
• The ELMCIP team, particularly Scott Rettberg, Jill Walker Rettberg, Patricia Tomaszek, and Hannelen Leirvag.
• The Fulbright Foundation and the U.S. Norway Fulbright Foundation, for the invaluable opportunity to spend a year in Norway teaching and researching 100% in my specialization.
• All the writers and readers who have reached out to me and offered words of encouragement. You’ve kept me motivated during dark days of lonely labor.
• My lovely wife Kara Fore Flores. Without your patience and support I wouldn’t be able to find the time to pull off such an ambitious writing challenge.

Here’s to the next 500 entries!

This work in progress is a wonderful example of how digital media can be used in an integrated way to create art that transcends traditional media and genre distinctions. As Meyer describes the concept best in this artist statement.

I wrote a novel, and it was a poem, and I called it Into the Green Green Mud. But coming from an experimental theatre background, where script and performance are distinct entities, the text was only the beginning. How would I “perform” this novel? The standard performance of a novel is justified black text on white paper. But is that really the best way to explore time and love and change and the weather?

His theatre background has attuned him to what is understood as the performative turn, a paradigm shift that for the past several decades has focused attention on the performance as a key signifying act. The notion of script and performance is literalized by HTML works, because they consist of a source code that is interpreted by software and hardware to produce a readable work. As a multimedia artist, Meyer keenly aware of the analog and digital materials available to him,

The first performance of Into the Green Green Mud is under way, and I’d like you to be a part of it. We’re starting online, with original illustrations, animations, fonts, and music. OddBird will write the code, and Teacup Gorilla will write the music. From there we can make it a reading, a rock concert, a book, or all of these things at once.

Two aspects stand out from this description: its collaborative nature and handcrafted aesthetic. While Meyer wrote the text of the novel, drew the illustrations, designed three fonts, and has shaped the presentation of the work, he is producing it with two teams of people close to him (brothers and friends) on the code backdrop and musical composition. And it shows. Every component of this project is lovingly custom made, coming together to enhance the original text with a design acumen parallel to Wes Anderson’s distinctive mise-en-scène.

Fittingly enough, the concept of mise-en-scène was appropriated from theater by film theorists to emphasize the compositional nature of filmmaking, emphasizing the blank canvas around which a shot is composed. Like theater, which begins with an empty stage that needs to be developed into a meaningful space by carefully designing, placing, blocking, and scripting every element, so the filmmaker and Web designer need to build each shot and node in their medium to achieve their desired effect. As a programmer with a background in experimental theater, Meyer uses pure HTML and CSS to arrange each element of this project: text, static and kinetic images in multiple layers, and wireframes to shape and arrange each aspect dynamically in in browser windows that come in many shapes, sizes, and screen resolutions.

Part of the pleasure of this “novel (with pictures)” is that we can appreciate each layer of this performance as it becomes deployed. Meyer’s narrative verse is reminiscent of Shel Silverstein’s illustrated books, as are his drawings. His prose and verse are arranged graphically, but also using HTML conventions, such as ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists, and formatting as definable characteristics of text. Its whimsical alliterations, metrical bursts, and distinctive voices are enhanced by custom fonts, as can be seen in the example below.

Most of Into the Green Green Mud is displayed as a clean text in handmade fonts arranged near the center of the screen, as can be seen in the image above. The earlier images in this entry show some of the other layers implemented, such as wireframes, images, and animations (though you’ll have to visit the site to see the kinetic aspects in action). This is a publicly available work in progress with fully documented code— a patient performance slowly unfolding over time— so that every time we visit, we are likely to discover a newly transformed page or chapter.

This virtuoso creation by a talented young poet, writer, artist, typographer, programmer, and musician is a taste of things to come as new generations of digital media and code literate creators come of age.