I ♥ E-Poetry

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.

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.

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 suite of 20 short pieces, is focused on technologies and codes left behind in the ever accelerating change of computer systems. Thuan describes it as “a requiem without mourning, sorrowing or lamenting since they are always recycled and resurrected, by one way or another, in different signifiers.” And indeed, some of these pieces use codes and HTML functionality already passé and mostly forgotten in 2006, such as pop up windows, link mouseovers to reveal texts through improved color contrast, frames, tables, menu windows, and so on. This isn’t just nostalgia, however, because Thuan is able to shake us up with scans (real or simulated?) of our browser cache or computer’s hard drive to reveal porn, options that may or may not send information about ourselves or our computer system (our digital self) to sources we may not trust, and other procedures that remind us that just because we cannot see the code doesn’t mean it isn’t there, active and readable. He also reminds us of code with texts in a hybrid of natural and computer language reminiscent of Mez Breeze’s mezangelle. Overall, this work leads us to meditate on numerous issues surrounding ourselves and signification in digital environments.

Organized by the Genesis narrative into 7 parts, one for each day, this work places the Biblical story of the creation of the world in conversation with modern times. Its sociopolitical tone is reinforced with references to literary characters, postmodern theorists, scientists, wars, the Internet, and civil rights leaders. Each piece contains a small Flash animation or interactive piece, some of which are clearly e-poems. These are the most delightful parts of this work because they manage to be playful without compromising the tone of the poem, a strategy echoed throughout this whole work. Thuan strikes a delicate balance between solemnity and tongue-in-cheekiness that lowers our guard so the seriousness of his piece can come through to us.

This hypertext work interconnects the moon with women, sexuality, Tantric texts, ancient folk medicine, and JavaScript. Yes. JavaScript. And it works because it aligns computer scripting codes with ancient algorithms: in this case, recipes and potions for psychological and sexual male enhancement. The scripting language displayed in some of the lexia is readable for those with some code literacy, and can be followed along by most, since it contains abundant natural language. Gender politics feature prominently in this work, touching on themes of sexual abuse, homosexuality, sexual enhancement, ancient recipes for gaining power over women, penis enlargement, modern ways in which women have low self-esteem, religion, and more. The audio component is in Realplayer format, a plugin that can be annoyingly commercial, but the experience is certainly enhanced by the light touches of music and sound in this piece. This piece has some random and interactive elements, and is therefore worth exploring several times to get a sense for the whole.