I ♥ E-Poetry

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

This generative poem is largely inspired by Kurt Schwitters and his Dadaist sound poetry, such as Ursonate (1922-1932). Free from the constraint of meaning, a sound poet is able to use language structured into units other than pre-established words to explore articulation, rhythm, sound combinations, rhyme, musicality, line lengths, the cultural associations of particular sounds, phonetics, and more.

The poem generates sound poems by processing words entered by the user generated and search engine results with the FIPS 181 Automated Password Generator algorithm, which produces a pronounceable encrypted set of sounds. The Web version has a machine read the syllables aloud, but this has also been used to generate scores for live performances, as seen in the documentation page.

I’m fascinated by how a word or phrase is “read” by the poem into such a different set of sounds transformed by contradictory human desires: to reveal (by searching and finding) and to conceal (through encryption and passwords).