I ♥ E-Poetry

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

This poem showcases Jhave’s talent for delicately combining theory, science, and intensely personal material in a native digital multimedia poem. The subtitle for this poem is ” a confession of carnal confusion concerning an absence of cognition” which he explains is the result of encountering “The Medium is the Message” as a teenager and being sexually aroused by one of its images. He also critiques that “most humanities scholars (McLuhan included) are ignorant of the raw technical complexity of neurology and data plumbing.” Considering that Jhave has named his website Glia after an essential component of the nervous system called Neuroglia, it is clear that he knows a thing or two about the brain and its mechanisms.

This poem is presented in several short stanzas along with quotes by McLuhan, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, replacing the poem and quotes piece by piece on a 4 second schedule, and looping back to the beginning when they reach the end. The videos are longer in duration and are also looped, changing the image-text juxtapositions as you reread the work. At the heart of this poem is an explanation of its title, extending the primary idea behind his earlier work “Typeoms.”

The poem does a beautiful job of showing how thought and words are grounded in the body and how other media (books, television, computers, Kleenex) shape the human body and its practices, softening dichotomies (body & intellect, content & form, medium & message) into feedback loops.