I ♥ E-Poetry

"The Roar of Destiny" by Judy Malloy

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:49:00 -0400

When this narrative hypertext poem was serially published from 1996 to 1999 it must’ve been a different reading experience from the site that we now have before us. The layering of narrative and poetic elements accumulating over time, shifting under the weight of memory and forgetfulness, with echoes and links to guide new and experienced readers alike, is an experience that is difficult to recreate. The closest thing to it is to read the lexia in numerical order, whether by going to the directory listing (http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/roarofdestiny/) or by changing the number of the lexia in the address bar). However, reading the complete work with the tools provided is a rich undertaking in and of itself.

Malloy offers her readers several interfaces to explore this web of 232 lexias, the most important of which is a textual map that consistently contextualizes the poem within a field of experiences and provides thematic links to other lexia, much as she did with Uncle Roger. The surrounding texts enrich the indented and in boldface narrative, allowing for multiple readings of the poem.

Follow the multiple paths of this engaging story about Gweneth (from l0ve0ne) and transport yourself to a vibrant time when the boundaries between the natural and virtual worlds started to liquefy.

"l0ve0ne" by Judy Malloy

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:36:00 -0400

"l0ve0ne" by Judy Malloy:

This hypertext narrative poem from 1994 was serially published on the early Internet, as described by Malloy.

In the spirit of the Internet, in the spirit of the web, portions of L0ve0ne originally appeared in different forms in servers all over the country — Sausalito, California; Palo Alto, California; Arlington, Virginia; and the Massachusetts North Shore. The story began on the Interactive Conference on Arts Wire. It was continued on the Arts Conference on the WELL. (notes)

The serial publication of this born digital narrative was also the first selection for the Eastgate Web Workshop in 1994. Eastgate Systems was the premier publisher of hypertexts before the World Wide Web, and it still offers a sophisticated set of tools for linking and mapping hypertexts.

The Web version is elegant in its simplicity, offering three navigational interfaces to experience the work: a list of links that reads like a poem itself, pure poetic text with links for the user to explore, or a framed version which combines the two. The link lines and background colors are linked thematically, allowing the reader to instantly and intuitively recognize certain moments in the narrative.

What jumps out of this engaging poem is its interweaving elements: a love story, a trip through Germany, computers, programming, disguises, barns, and the autobahn. And the 1s and 0s in its title are so well placed….

"Uncle Roger, File 1: A Party in Woodside" by Judy Malloy

Thu, 31 May 2012 09:25:00 -0400

"Uncle Roger, File 1: A Party in Woodside" by Judy Malloy:

This pioneering hypertext narrative poem was originally written in 1986-1987 in UNIX and BASIC (for floppy disk distribution) and was published as a Web version in 1995. The first of these, “A Party in Woodside,” offers two navigational options for readers to explore: a set of icons to the left of the poem which allows readers to read the work as it was serially written and published in 1986, or by following links from a textual mapping of the narrative:

jenny puffy uncle roger dreams and nightmares jane jeff jack family tom dorrie men in tan suits louise rose chips mark laura food and drink miss gorgel caroline david the house in woodside

Whenever a node contains one of the elements listed above, the element appears as a link, which allows readers to follow thematic or character driven sequences, which allows for multiple reading paths to experience this work.

Part of what has made this such an endearing and enduring work is Malloy’s instincts for structure and humor, pacing and plot. She chose to write a fragmented story about non-linear and associative things: parties, dreams, human interactions, food, the comings and goings of a cat, and more. She populated this world with a few memorable characters, but none more so than Uncle Roger himself, an always amusing trickster. The smoothly flowing prosy free verse foregrounds the narrative yet it finds moments to punctuate a situation with a well placed line break.

Now go explore this funny, sexy work and find out for yourself who ate the wrong bit of salmon roll.

"Afeeld" by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:02:00 -0400

"Afeeld" by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz:

Afeeld is a collection of playable intermedia and concrete art compositions that exist in the space between poetry and videogames.

One cannot do better in defining this collection of whimsically hip works by Liszkiewicz, a 2011 graduate of the M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from SUNY Buffalo (home to the Electronic Poetry Center). I will briefly comment on its different parts, each of which has its own look and feeld:

“Alphabet Man” is a sequence of 12 images built from letters of the alphabet, featuring the adventures of the iconic Alphabet Man as he explores the materials of writing (letters) in order to create new structures, some of which could be considered words.
“Feeldwork” presents the reader with 6 visual fields composed of letters, words, and characters, which respond to mouseovers and clicks to produce new words and meanings.
“Count as One” is a fascinating set of 15 drawing/writing tools, which invite the reader to click on the screen multiple times to create a work of letter art which the reader can save. The most interesting aspect about this work is the insight it provides on the psychogeography of the screen, shaping our interaction as a kind of dérive. Do several (or all) the pieces and think about how the graphical information he provides on each piece shapes where you click on the screen.
In “Concrete Games,” Liszkiewicz continues to transform our awareness of our screen interaction by using the visual structure and game dynamics of two videogames, Minesweeper and Asteroids, to guide us towards different types of artistic composition and play.
The provocatively titled work “This is Visual Poetry” makes very little use of language and doesn’t look like what most people would define as poetry because it is the result of “glitches created and controlled with computer game software.” You be the judge…
“Coda: I/O” presents the output of some of the above mentioned works, and are the result of an interaction and process rather than the process itself.

These works sit right in the middle of graphic art, poetics, and ludology and invite us to come and play.

"The Great Migration" by Jason Lewis

Tue, 29 May 2012 09:23:17 -0400

"The Great Migration" by Jason Lewis:

The theme of migration resonates powerfully through this poem because it can be conceptualized through so many different frames of reference. The most visual one is evoked by sperm-like word clusters swimming in the water-like screen space, a migration that results in death for most and survival through fertilization— which is also a radical transformation. When combined with the notion of human migration through history (and prehistory) that results in genetic and ethnic diversity, this work becomes very personal for Jason Lewis, who describes his ethnicity as “Cherokee, Hawaiian, Samoan, raised in northern California rural mountain redneck culture.” Another perspective on migration occurs as academics go towards employment opportunities and are shaped by the institutions that receive them, as was the case with Lewis joining the faculty of the Design and Computation Arts program at Concordia University in Canada and founding the OBX Laboratory for Experimental Media. From a more media-specific notion of migration, the shift from page to screen, not just of the word, but of individual and community identities echoes with the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace project.

So get the free iOS app, view the video documentation, or go see this work as an installation to experience the flow of objects and words, randomness and direction, rivers and seas, tap and trace, strings and constellations.

“Buzz Aldrin Doesn’t Know Any Better” by Jason Lewis

Mon, 28 May 2012 11:02:00 -0400

“Buzz Aldrin Doesn’t Know Any Better” by Jason Lewis:

This poem evokes the attempt to make sense out of a conversation with a rambling street person in San Francisco, and its design and interface both contribute to that effect.

Lewis breaks up the line into words clustered together in a large font size to form a word cloud. The superposition of the gently rotating words create a dense, white, unreadable mass, which only makes sense around the edges as words are able to briefly break free into a space with better contrast. But just because you can’t read a word doesn’t mean it isn’t there: touching a word on the screen makes it appear along with the rest of the words in the line, by changing the font color to purple. One word in each line is a softer shade of purple and will follow your fingertip on the surface of the touchscreen.

The lines that emerge in this poem make sense in oblique ways and are held together more by physical proximity than by its non sequitur logic, yet they succeed in creating the voice of a character, one whose stream of consciousness patter can barely be guided by simply bringing up a word in their own speech.

With its word constellations, this second poem in Lewis’ P.o.E.M.M. project seems to be informed by a Concrete Poetry aesthetic, while the atomic deconstruction of the lines in “What They Speak When They Speak to Me” can be aligned with the Lettriste tradition.

"What They Speak When They Speak to Me" by Jason Lewis

Sun, 27 May 2012 13:34:00 -0400

"What They Speak When They Speak to Me" by Jason Lewis:

Originally produced as an installation piece for large touchscreen monitors in 2007, this poem is now available as a free iOS App. This is the first of a series of poems that explore the expressive potential of touchscreen interfaces, called the P.o.E.M.M. project (Poems for Excitable [Mobile] Media). The Speak app features “What They Speak When They Speak to Me,” along with poems by Jim Andrews, J.R. Carpenter, David Jhave Johnston, and Aya Karpinska - each of which successfully capture each poet’s voice and poetics.

The Speak app turns all the letters of the poems into a kind of letter cloud or constellation but with the letters hovering over their relative position. When you touch the screen and drag your fingertip across it, the poetic line is reconstituted from that point onwards, following the trail left by your finger’s movement, and fading back into the cloud when you lift your finger. This allows for readers to experience incomplete lines and incomplete words, depending on where you’ve touched in the sentence. Lewis engages this computational structure in his poem thematically, because it is about miscommunication across language, culture, and identity. The snippets of comprehension one gets when hearing speech in different languages are echoed in the poem’s structure.

Here’s a suggestion for reading the poem somewhat systematically: after reading each line (or partial line), find a spot in the surface and make a little loop with your finger over it to concentrate the letters and allow you to visually clear the field, reducing repetition and providing a sense of completion, if not necessarily closure.

"Still Life" by Eric LeMay

Sat, 26 May 2012 09:05:34 -0400

"Still Life" by Eric LeMay:

This ironically titled poem is inspired by Eadweard J. Muybridge’s studies in motion photography of living creatures. Muybridge experimented with different ways of capturing the motion of living beings using a variety of photographic technologies and joining individual photographs to create animated sequences. With the image rotation interface he creates for this poem, juxtaposed with the rhyming lines of verse that are displayed on a loop (a rotation in time), LeMay poem leads us to reflect on the stillness and motion, time and space, the body and its representation. The looping sounds of a heartbeat and the ticking of a clock triggered by mousing over images are a reminder that there is no such thing as stillness in life.

"Mondrian Mood" by Eric LeMay

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:23:43 -0400

"Mondrian Mood" by Eric LeMay:

Inspired by and built on Piet Mondrian’s artwork, Eric LeMay writes a poem that reacts with the surface it is written upon. Different sections in the painting and color are used to structure lines of verse, in a way that represents two voices in conversation. One of the voices wants a heron in the work, while the other one is more concerned with the aesthetics of De Stijl, which don’t leave much room for natural elements, such as herons. The poem uses a restrained sense of humor to create play between meanings of words (such as “eye” and “I”), abstraction and representation, and the senses used to experience the rich textures of Mondrian’s paintings.

"Automatype" by Daniel C. Howe

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:15:26 -0400

"Automatype" by Daniel C. Howe:

This is a fascinating poetic use of RiTa, a “software toolkit for generative literature” developed by Daniel C. Howe. The randomly selected words arranged on a 3x3 grid are transformed into other words over time by adding, subtracting, or substituting one letter at a time. Sometimes the path to a new word is through nonsense words, and these are part of the pleasure of this work. The abstracted typewriter sounds punctuate every letter substitution, and reaching a new word is rewarded by a “ding” sound and flashing brown highlight of the square in the grid where the newly completed word is. The cumulative effect is hypnotic, as one sees where the flashing cursor moves to, what words are created, and the entire piece transforms itself from where it began.

This minimalist poem is in the same generative and conceptual tradition as Tisselli’s “Synonymovie” and Buchardon’s “Changer Tout” because they all begin with a word or phrase and track its transformations as words become replaced by synonyms over time. In this case, the path of word relations isn’t semantic, but typographical.

I recommend setting this up as an installation piece, or placing it fullscreen, and letting it wash over you as you read and observe it. With the volume turned down a bit, it might even be a great aid to meditation.

"In Your Voice" by Machine Libertine

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:27:00 -0400

"In Your Voice" by Machine Libertine:

These two video poems integrate four elements: Natalia Fedorova’s voice reading silky lines of her sonorous poetry in Russian, a Mac Os text to speech voice reading a translation in English, Taras Mashatalir’s haunting musical soundscapes, and Stan Mashov’s conceptual videos. The contrast between Fedorova’s voice, even though it’s been transformed through sound engineering, and the mechanical reading provided by the software emphasizes how much meaning inheres in breath, tone, and intimacy when performed “in your voice.” The video is composed of fragmented flowing surfaces which contain images that enhance the experience of the poem, while the music helps shape the tone and pulls the work together by situating the voices within the space evoked by the visuals.

If you really want to lose yourself in these two poems, I suggest viewing it in Vimeo on fullscreen mode with good sound or headphones.

"Eight Was Where It Ended" by Jeremy Douglass

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:20:00 -0400

"Eight Was Where It Ended" by Jeremy Douglass:

This poem makes ingenious use of the folder list view in Mac OS X to structure a series of nested lines in meaningful ways. Each line of the poem is written on the name of the folder and the folders contain other folders with lines. This allows for the whole poem to be nested inside of a folder with the title, and up to 5 more levels of nesting within. The image above shows the first level of nested folders, which can be read as a concise narrative poem. opening each line reveals new lines, and new potential levels, all of which enrich the poem with details that deliver an emotional impact. The folders gain poetic and symbolic resonance as we consider questions of the outer and inner lives (and deaths) of the characters in this poem, and how we might reimagine poetic structures, such as line and stanza, in digital poetry.

You’ll need an Apple computer to be able to interact with the work, but Douglass does a great job of documenting the work in several ways to allow us to conceptualize and appreciate the poem. It pays off to experience the work in as many ways as possible paying close attention to interface details we might normally gloss over, such as date and time.

"Tideland" by M.D. Coverley

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:44:00 -0400

"Tideland" by M.D. Coverley:

Originally published in BeeHive 3:4 (December 2000), this poem maps human experiences, narrative, weddings, funerals, and memory onto the ebb and flow of waters in tidelands— those coastal regions where rivers flow into the sea. The metaphorical relations between tidelands and individual and collective experience, past and present, knowledge and intuition are enacted in the use of hypertext and layers. This layering of text and image makes some lines and words difficult to read, breaking with the tradition of sequential arrangement of texts to draw attention towards new juxtapositions and the blending of human experiences. The poem also references estuaries, islands, and water during high, low, and neap tides— lunar and maritime cycles presented as a female analog to the more masculine solar solstices and equinoxes that have received such archetypal attention.

This is a work worthy of rereading and reflection to allow its language and images to ebb and flow in and out of your conscious mind.

"TRANS.MISSION [A Dialogue]" by J.R. Carpenter

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:43:10 -0400

"TRANS.MISSION [A Dialogue]" by J.R. Carpenter:

This generative poem focuses our attention on several technologies used for transmitting and receiving messages, the perils of transatlantic crossings in the North Atlantic ocean, the missions sent to survey and map the land, and the need for communication to occur successfully across physical and historical distances. The poem is generated from 72 variables and a rich word data set for each (see lines 37-109 in the source code) to produce more versions than anyone should really need to calculate because the total number is beyond the scale of thorough human readability, as proven by Raymond Queneau in 1961. The trick is to “try again” and read multiple generated versions— which happens automatically every 80,000 miliseconds (about 1:33) or you can refresh the page— and intuit the ideas, structures, tensions, relations, and variations each version gestures towards.

J.R. Carpenter’s poem is very coherent, thriving in its permutations to reconfigure multiple human experiences, anxieties, needs for communication, and technologies across time and space.

"Along the Briny Beach" by J.R. Carpenter

Sat, 19 May 2012 15:17:00 -0400

"Along the Briny Beach" by J.R. Carpenter:

For this generative poem J.R. Carpenter infused the Taroko Gorge source code with coastal language, and used the HTML marquee tag to insert other beach themed texts and images into the generated page (see the credits). What she assembles on the screen for us is an elegant pastiche of poetic and scientific texts, displaying on different schedules and layered to produce rich juxtapositions. The marquees allow for simple interactivity, such as pausing, speeding up, or reversing the flow of text or images— a blessing when one comes across an engaging snippet of text— that evokes the back and forth flow of water on the beach. But perhaps the most engaging part is the generated text cascading down the screen, providing us with an experience of a perilous coastline as the site of conflict between humanity and the sea, subject to tsunamis and riptides, where “quays pollute,” “gulfs disguise,” and “wharfs collapse.” This is not a romanticized beach designed to attract tourists, nor are the ones referred to in the texts she remixes to create this poem.

And for those who stand on the shores of cyberspace and wonder about the origin and shape of the texts that flow onto generated pages spaces, I recommend you dive into the source code (a right click on the poem should present the option): it’s more readable and fascinating than you might think.

"The Cape" by J.R. Carpenter

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:22:00 -0400

"The Cape" by J.R. Carpenter:

This tersely prosaic hypertext poem tells a story about a young woman spending time with her grandmother and uncle in Cape Cod. Full of images, maps, and factual information, Carpenter develops a powerful sense of place, as its narrative unfolds, except not all is as it seems. In the credits, Carpenter states that:

Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched.
The diagrams are not to scale.

The use of maps, images, video, audio, geological and scientific data, and the structure of memoir all gesture towards verosimilitude, but the Carpenter’s statement above and the story itself undermine that tendency we have towards trusting that kind of information. Some questions to ask to better appreciate the deliciously deadpan humor in this piece are: Can we trust the speaker? Can we trust the artist’s statement above? Here’s a hint: we can’t even trust the navigational interface to give us access to all the sections of the text.

Explore this space, its story, its voice, and its representation, and you may find that whether it’s real or not, it is full of truthiness.

“petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction" (“small brush to dust off fiction”) by Philippe Bootz

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:58:00 -0400

“petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction" (“small brush to dust off fiction”) by Philippe Bootz:

This narrative poem in French by Philippe Bootz is generated from constraints and possibilities, tapping into Jean de la Fontaine’s poetry, OULIPO, and the classical unities of Greek drama. Constructed around the concept of a domestic thriller, characters enter and leave a room, in which different events happen, leading to happy or sad endings, and a final comment on the story’s banality or unbearability, leading to the conclusion that one shouldn’t reread it. Ironically enough, the words
“Une autre!” appear in a large, insistent red font, inviting the reader to click on it and generate a new story. Since the story is obscured by dust, the reader must move the pointer (or finger on a touchscreen device) over the text to “brush” it off for enough time to read the text in the layer underneath.

Note: Here’s a suggestion for those who can’t read French to access the work. Generate the poem and save the page. Then reopen the saved HTML page, which will contain a generated text you can cut and paste onto your favorite translation software. I like Google Translate. But don’t stop there. Do this several times so you can read some of the variations. The pleasures of this text arise from the multiple generated narratives.

"You’re lying and you filter…" by Paul Bogaert

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:00:06 -0400

"You’re lying and you filter…" by Paul Bogaert:

Between the disciplined dress, posture, and hair of the women taking dictation and the speaker’s tighly controlled voice as he savors every line, word, syllable, and phoneme in this video, this poem seems to be inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings. The video is built from short looping clips from a 1942 film titled “Nursing: Your Life’s Work” in which nurses are taking their board examinations to be certified. The voice of Simon Shrimpton-Smith reads the lines of the poem with great gusto, and when juxtaposed with the images, makes it seem like the women are taking dictation on what seems to be a legal case. The frames of reference evoked by the images and legal language make stimulating clashes with choice words and phrases sprinkled throughout the poem that evoke completely different frames of reference. The repetitions of images and language underscore the word choices, their phonetic qualities, enhancing their cognitive and poetic impact.

"Opacity" by Serge Bouchardon, i-Trace Collective, and Léonard Dumas

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:16:49 -0400

"Opacity" by Serge Bouchardon, i-Trace Collective, and Léonard Dumas:

This poetic narrative examines the contradictory desires for transparency and opacity in human relationships. Each of its four parts examines different aspects of this idea with its own distinctive interfaces, all smoothly implemented using the canvas tag in HTML 5. The sections of the poem look at the inside of a computer, the speaker’s wife’s body, the language of relationships and knowing one another, and the opacity of a shower door. In each of them we are led to reflect on what lies beneath the surface of something or someone and whether having that knowledge leads to a more understanding or a better relationship. The final part leads us to think about how opacity, a little mystery even, is good for marriage, and enhances desire.

"ChangeEverything" by Serge Bouchardon and i-Trace Collective

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:12:21 -0400

"ChangeEverything" by Serge Bouchardon and i-Trace Collective:

This elegantly understated work of generative poetry takes the words in a phrase and substitutes its nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with synonyms from an online dictionary. Its stylish interface blends the worlds of paper and digital media: a messy ink blot serves as background for white words, Internet icons, and switches that control the display of the text. The simplicity of the interactivity is inviting: readers can simply click on words to have them replaced, click on the refresh icon to change all the words, explore sets of sentences or adages, and write their own— which can have the most impact because the writer is invested in what they write, and can see it transformed away from their intended message.

Like Eugenio Tisselli’s “Synonymovie,” this work leads us down a path of signification that provides insight on the denotations, connotations, frames of reference, and other textures of words, but in this case, working at the level of phrases and sentences. The initial set of sentences (with the exception of a Shakespearean quote) seem to have a consistent voice from a speaker who yearns to achieve things, yet the mechanism of the poem deconstructs those expressions— a theoretical move gestured at by the repeated use of the word “trace.”