"Seattle Drift" by Jim Andrews
This is the first poem I read by Jim Andrews and it is still a favorite because of its elegance, economy, and naughtiness. It is also Andrews’ first DHTML poem, written in the early days of the Web (1997), and marking a shift in his practice from visual poetry to a poetry in which he yields some of his control over the text to his readers. This poem, along with “Enigma n” and the “Stir Fry Texts” punctuate a vibrant period in his development as a Web artist in which he started to imbue his texts with behavior: responsiveness to carefully defined user input, motion triggered and controlled by interactivity, controlled randomness, and looped or open ended scheduling of the experience.
“Seattle Drift” leads us to think about different poetic “scenes” and how a text can enter and exit these poetic traditions through the deceptively simple mechanism of “drifting.”
For a close reading informed by media-specific analysis of “Seattle Drift” read the sub-section titled “Drifting from the Scene” in my dissertation (172-184). You can also read about this period in his artistic development in the section titled “DHTML Dances” (158-206).
