I ♥ E-Poetry

This kinetic collage poem is built out of text by Soderman and quotes from eight pieces written by theorists and writers whose work reflects upon the nature of writing in spaces other than the printed page. Cut into lines and blocks of text, each of these textual portions are anchored or set adrift in a “page_space” designed by Soderman to allow them to move and rearrange themselves into new textual combinations. In addition to encouraging readers to click on texts to get other quotes from the same source, Soderman places several objects into the space that trigger different events, such as a book that stops the textual movement when clicked. The behaviors triggered by each of the objects remind the readers of how configurable the space for digital writing can be by enacting some of the concepts brought forth by the quoted writers.

This creative engagement of the potential Soderman saw for digital environments to radically reconfigure the interface of a page led to his 2005 Page Space experiment.

This multimedia hypertext narrative published by Eastgate Systems integrates media as well as genres, combining video, games, music, voice recording, and poetry. While not purely an electronic poem, its deployment of language is certainly e-poetic, displaying lines of text that hover in strategic parts of the screen when triggered by readers exploring the images placed before them with a mouse or touchscreen controlled pointer.

The way Hayward cuts her writing into lines of verse, even when following the phrasal and rhetorical logic of prose is an example of how the incorporation of language into multimedia digital environments moves towards the poetic. This partly accounts for the strong correlation between concrete and digital poetry: they are informed by the use of language in graphic design, but with artistic rather than commercial goals.

The video documentation linked to above leads to further short videos, which make a compelling argument for purchasing the work and experience it firsthand.

This narrative poem is a fascinating type of hypertext because instead of having five primary nodes from which to follow linear threads it uses a layering interface for navigation. The reader, instead of clicking on links, scrapes away at images to reveal an image beneath, and can continue to scrape away until she reaches the end of that narrative thread. This allows readers to reveal more than one layer at a time, as pictured above in a screenshot of three layers in the introduction.

This interface is acknowledged from the outset and referenced throughout the work, as the painter sequestered in this room puts layers after layers of paint on the walls as her ideas about her piece develop. Thus, as animals become elements in a landscape and dream images inhabit the piece, and the work becomes symbolically and psychologically stratified.

Reading and interpreting the painting and writing on the wall isn’t merely a spectator sport in this work: much is at stake. From narrative framing details in the introduction to an allusion to the Book of Daniel within a layer of the North Wall (see image below), Fletcher adds political and historical dimensions to this piece that go deeper than a simple patina.

The Kafkaesque impact of the conclusion is an argument for readers to experience the work sequentially, at least the first time, by exploring all the layers in each node before moving to the next one. Once you reach the end, I suspect you will want to reread it as I did, scraping with urgency to get to the bottom of this poem.

It is not surprising it made the shortlist in the 2012 New Media Writing Prize.

This scheduled poem is built around a quote from James Elkins’ 1999 book, The Domain of Images, in which he analyzes the blurred boundaries between images and writing. In this quote, he is focusing on a piece by Chu Ta (also known as Bada Shanren) in which a Chinese character is written / drawn in way that it can be simultaneously looked at as a flower and read as a word. The conclusion of Elkins’ analysis of this piece seems to have provided inspiration to Bell:

Visually, Bell is overlaying different typographical expressions of the same quote by Elkins: one in a serifed font and another smaller one in a sans serif font. Close attention to the differences between the two fonts, reveal how painterly serifs can be. The line breaks are also different, cutting prose into poetry. The scheduled presentation of this piece is used to add layers of formatting, such as italicizing the book title, or adding lines of color, or a handwritten text at the bottom of the window.

Bell is adding a few brushstrokes to the text, making it his own.

This hypertext poem makes clever use of HTML in its design to tell the story of a speaker’s associations with a place in in the Louisiana bayou, relationships, and the moon. This piece is designed for a 500 x 500 pixel window and uses the now discontinued frame tag to separate the space into navigation (bottom) and textual (top) frames. A quick look at the source code in the top frame reveals that it was composed with Microsoft FrontPage 3.0 and it uses a no-longer functional JavaScript applet (from early 1996) that randomly selects one of the following three lines and scrolls them on the screen:

function scrollit_r2l(seed)  
{   
var m1 = " Conjuring: beauty, health, self-improvement. ";   
var m2 = " Love and Romance. ";   
var m3 = " Magick between dawn and sunset. "; 

One more technical detail: I suggest viewing this poem with more than one browser— and at least one of them should be Internet Explorer which offers the best backwards compatibility for old code— because the screen text is rendered a bit differently by each browser. And since this is a poem you want to see as intended, I suggest using this link to the Confluence section in Cauldron & Net, volume 2 and selecting the poem so it opens in a new window (you may need to instruct your pop-up blocker to allow it). Alternatively, resize the window, so there is text aligned over the moon.

Perhaps the most important use of HTML in the design for this poem is the use of background and text colors in conjunction with changing the background color when the reader places the pointer over certain locations in the text. The text is in two colors: black and light yellow, so by toggling the background colors, one can reveal different texts on the same page. The choice of colors resonate with the lunar theme of the piece, in which the dynamics of a relationship between men and women is likened to the relative positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Seen this way, the waxing, waning, and eclipses of the moon can be understood as different stages in a couple’s relationship— sometimes representing problems that not even a love potion can resolve.

This piece is one of those rare examples of e-poems that exhibits the same textual behaviors as a print text— purely static— yet is created through such a creative engagement with the medium that it merits consideration as e-literature. Its visual design is evocative of both programming conventions (particularly the practice of numbering lines of code) and of green monochrome monitors. The numbering of its lines and stanzas, with two notable exceptions, obey a simple formal logic yet add programming texture and structure to the poem. The cluster of 10 lines beginning with “x01,” each of which is divided into four columns breaks the numbering pattern, simultaneously offering a visual structure that could be read as lines or columns. This is framed by two identically numbered 2-line stanzas (010801 & 010802) which contain different texts but are formatted on left and right hand margins of the window.

Is this some sort of a glitch? Is it meant to jolt us into attentiveness?

Perhaps there are clues in the text itself, which is admittedly difficult to parse.

This literary game which can be equally used to create prose and verse is a tribute to the Surrealist parlor game known as the “exquisite cadaver” and the paper-based Mad Libs created by Roger Price and Leonard Stern in 1953 (for more details, read Montfort’s introduction to the Literary Games issue of Poems that GO). This program originally created in Perl allows people to create texts and tag words to become “dreamfields.” When someone blindly fills in the dreamfield, it reconstructs the text with the reader’s input. Hilarity ensues.

This work is currently not functioning online. The Internet Archive has “crawled” this work 62 times since 2003, which means that one can access earlier copies of this work along with different dreamfields ready for you to fill in. This is an imperfect preservation of the work, however, because you cannot read the works produced. At least you can get an idea of what were some of the works created with this framework.

And if you’d like a taste of how this works, try out “Newspaper Ads” by Price and Stern: the very first Mad Lib in their first of many books.

This poem is mapped onto a nine tile sliding puzzle, the kind that traditionally has a single image that one can scramble or unscramble. The interface for this is the same, but Lewis throws a curve ball in this piece: every time the reader moves a tile— perhaps with the hope of completing the image— the image changes. One set of images is a photograph of Lewis himself, and another is a kind of map, suggesting that if we could complete it, we’d see him or where he’s from. But identity isn’t that simple to put together, particularly in the case of someone with such a diverse ethnic background as Lewis. Keep this idea in mind as you read the text as you attempt to complete the puzzle— will you get closure from this piece by completing the puzzle or is this denied much like easy answers about identity are to Lewis?

Explore more of this theme and his meaningful use of interfaces by clicking on the “Jason Lewis” tag below.

This poem is the result of two creative collaborations: Max Dunlop’s poem “orbital: a postcard to space travel” and Neil Jenkins’ generative engine that creates an entirely different experience of the work.

A conceptual link is that of human communication across space. The idea of a postcard is very tied to travel, since they can be sent through a postal service anywhere on the planet to a physical address. This paper-based model of human communication doesn’t work well when people leave the planet, requiring technologies that work with electronic signals. During a time of digital networks, packets are still being sent from one address to another, but they are digital sequences sent to numerical IP addresses, translated into more natural language by DNS servers.

Dunlop’s poem is about space travel across time, from sailors guiding their ships with the stars to modern day traffic out and around the planet and beyond. Jenkins’ interface incorporates the IP addresses of its readers into an algorithm that selects a word from Dunlop’s poem and places it into a space that responds to the reader’s mouse movements to direct their orbital motions.

The voice reading the IP addresses out loud are a constant reminder of the locations that inform the text generation, but it gets old fast. I recommend muting the voice to lose yourself in what can be a powerfully ambient visual poem that produces delightful juxtapositions.

This responsive (or “reactive” work as described in Megan Sapnar’s essay “Reactive Media Meets E-Poetry”) is a great example of a work that reacts to user input, though I’m not sure there’s enough of a language base to connect it to poetic tradition. Translated as “In the lion’s mouth” (though I feel “In the wolf’s mouth” is more accurate) this feels more like a visual art piece than a poem and I suspect Clauss would agree, since he describes his works in Flying Puppet as “tableaux interactifs” (interactive tableau).

Regardless of classification, this is an engagingly atmospheric piece that invites interaction with a surreal payoff. Move the pointer and play with this work to discover what lies above and beneath the image and interface, considering all the layers involved. And don’t forget that you are one of those layers…