I ♥ E-Poetry

This new entry in the PoEMM series was recently published as a free iOS app, following closely a redesigned website and a booklet documenting the series. Designed for touchscreen devices, this poem fills the screen with its lines scrolling from one side to another at different speeds and in different directions. Readers encountering this wall of text may find it a bit overwhelming— too much language at the same time to apprehend.

The desire to stabilize the text, to gain some control over it leads to touch the text, to see if one can control it, slow down its motion, maybe make it change direction. And it works… sort of. One can do some of these things, but the control is limited to a gesture— I’m being deliberately vague to leave room for discovery. To seek too much control over the text leads to a typographical explosion, of sorts that leads to obscured portions of the text, as seen below.

As the words expand beyond readability, the letter you initially touched remains transparent, becoming a color lens by which we can read the rest of the text. Motion does not cease, however, and while readability is achievable, the app is designed to resist the comfort of a static text (unless via screen capture). It also invites playful exploration, rewarding multiple touchscreen interactions with different effects.

As you read and manipulate the poem, pay attention to the thematic connection between the poem’s text and its meaningful behaviors: the words’ movement and response to your touch. You’ll see how this enacts a visual deconstruction of a terminology that exposes issues of power and control over language.

This free app art poem captures Zellen’s approach wonderfully. Each of the four squares respond to touch and can be tapped to change within each category or dragged to reposition with the others. Each category is representative of the materials she traditionally works with:

• color,
• drawings,
• art based on tracings of newspaper and other materials, and
• language derived from newspapers, books, and other sources.

The language square seems to generate a new three-line stanza that could be read by itself as a single poem, sequentially as a longer (seemingly infinite) work, as a generative poem which can be apprehended as a template and dataset, or as an element in a larger combinatorial work when juxtaposed with the other three squares.

Designed for the iOS environment, its simple interface and minimalist design offer readers a path for individual meditation about one’s place in urban environments. Non-locative and individual, it is the perfect poetic and artistic counterpoint to Foursquare.

This poem is the fourth in the P.o.E.M.M. (Poem for Excitable [Mobile] Media) series, which explores iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) as a creative platform for poetic expression. Each work investigates meaningful interactions with this environment, such as arranging texts on the screen space for readers to discover with touch and dragging gestures (“Speak”), using multitouch capability to pull out a line of poetry from a text cloud (“Know”), and combining the latter with tapping gestures to provoke words out of moving objects (“Migration”). This latest work engages the iOS environment as a market— an important aspect of artistic production.

The first three apps have been available free and unlimited in the Apple Store, but the Bastard app is priced at $10 and in a limited and numbered edition of 100. This aligns the work with the printmaking tradition, which discovered early on that the more copies produced of a print the more distributed its market value became— and that by limiting, numbering, and signing the number of copies they could re-imbue the mechanically reproduced object with what Walter Benjamin famously called “aura.” How does one create aura in an age of digital reproduction, when the creation of copies of digital objects is accelerated exponentially and people are used to getting them for free? Douglas Davis famously updated and critiqued Benjamin’s essay in 1995, claiming that the aura resides “not in the thing itself but in the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise.” Over 70 years after Benjamin and almost two decades after Davis, Apple has created a set of devices for publication of born-digital objects and a marketplace for legal and protected distribution of the same. Jason Lewis isn’t the first to distribute free or sell e-poetry in iOS, but he is the first to explore a higher priced limited edition model in this environment. Interestingly enough, this model further aligns e-literature with the art world rather than with the literary world in which value is assigned through copyright and edition rather than in the creation of unique or limited objects that circulate in gallery spaces and exhibitions.

“Smooth Second Bastard” is certainly a hybrid, a poetic creation in which language becomes art. Touching the screen prompts the appearance of a white line of text just above one’s finger or stylus, which can be read a voice (or voices) that interpellates the implied addressee (presumably Lewis himself). When the reader stops touching the device, all but one of the words in the line float off screen. The remaining word is assigned a color and gently floats semi-randomly on the screen as it increases in size. As the reader continues to read lines, any words in excess of three fall apart, leaving behind a letter that grows in size at a faster rate with a newly assigned color, becoming part of a multicolored painterly background. Touching the screen on two locations divides the line in a way that allows you to invert each half, multiplying the reading possibilities in the fruitful tradition of the cut-up. It is a poem that by writing, design, and distribution bridges worlds of art, literature, race, ethnicity, printing, electronic publishing, text, image, writer, artist, programmer, and reader.

I suggest you get this poem while you can, because it is both an event and a rare limited edition of a born-digital object. It has aura.

This work is a poetic tour de force in which Mann shows how much information can be lost when language is written down. Intonation, cadence, volume, emphasis, pause, breathing, and so much nonverbal information infuses the recorded vocal performances of these texts that the written texts pale by comparison. To try to represent Mann’s Australian accent, rhythms, and pauses in writing would’ve given E. E. Cummings nightmares— and he was a master at encoding speech patterns on the page (see [Buffalo Bill ‘s] for an example).

Here’s why: Read the following text from “watching words change meaning,” noting how long it takes to read out loud: “an adjectival vIctim fetish of How to stop the nail.”

Now listen to this audio clip, preferably with headphones or loud speakers, and notice how much information is in the pause. How do you write that down?

Mann provides access to both written and audio texts in a minimalist interface that takes a little getting used to— both online and in the iOS app. It invites clicking around, which results in fascinatingly incomprehensible speech, as the audio files become layered and words jumble together. The great thing about this layering is that, while we lose individual words and their meanings, we gain a heightened sense of the rhythms and musicality of Mann’s speech.

What’s it about? Read and listen to it for yourself! If it’s any help, here’s a Wordle generated from the text in “watching words change meaning,” which should at least give you an idea of his most commonly used words.

This suite of Letterist sound poems for the iOS platform offers several environments and behaviors for the letters that inhabit them.The interfaces go from simple to complex, and Piringer uses phrases with the verbs “draw, control, build, create, and connect” to guide the reader to interact and play with the letters and tools offered.

Part of the interest in manipulating these letter objects is in the physics of their movement. Part is in the sounds they make when they collide with vowels to make the Letterist equivalent of a syllable. Wear headphones when you listen to Tracks to appreciate their spatiality and vocal remix magic.

I wonder if he used Realbeat to create them?

This Letterist sound poem brings an important and timely question to Apple’s popular touchscreen devices: what are the possibilities for this ancient writing technology (the alphabet) when inscribed in this new digital medium?

As researchers like Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, Concrete and Letterist poets, typeface designers and typographers have long known, letters have great expressive power and statuesque complexity. And in digital media, fonts aren’t just pretty shapes for letters: they are software with programmed behaviors, seen in the algorithms that determine kerning, for example. How a letter is spaced when placed next to another is part of the art and craft of typographers, and is encoded into digital fonts.

But that is not all they can do, as Piringer’s poem demonstrates. These letters are programmed with other behaviors, patterned after crickets, vehicles, birds, and react in different ways to coming into contact with each other as they move and leave traces on the virtual page-like surface they are placed into. The environment itself isn’t entirely page-like either, since its edges can be wraparound or imbued with gravity (or lack of) so the letters move towards or away from the bottom of the screen, which can be tilted to redirect the flow of letters. The letters can be touched, dragged, pointed in directions, and even destroyed in this poem, but they cannot be controlled, suggesting that they have minds of their own, as they follow their programmed behaviors and make their distinctive sounds. The aspect of sound is another of the great delights of this poem. Informed by a rich sound poetry tradition, each letter is assigned one or several recorded (and phonetically informed) vocalizations. This aural dimension of the letters also responds to collisions in diverse ways, depending upon the behavior chosen for the letters and their environment.

This very inexpensive app is a valuable poetic experience of the expressive possibilities of language in this digital environment.

This conceptual generative poem draws lines randomly from a set of 2500 images of book spines, all in the areas of art, theory, and architecture. The result is a stack of 14 books with titles that can be read as lines in a sonnet. The image above is from the Web version, which contains much more information than simply what appears in the titles: color, width, varied typography, author, press, logos, and other pictorial information. The image below is from the iOS version, which only presents the titles in plain, left justified, sans serif white text on a black background.

The image-based web version draws attention to the materiality of the book, its heft, width, length, suggesting that poetry that can be found in a stack of books. The iOS version focuses our attention on the language itself and how the titles read as lines of poetry. The title of a book can be as carefully chosen as a line in a poem, and exhibit similar compression. The typography and design of a book is also artistic and tactical in its choices and to see all that information stripped from the text in the iOS version may sadden those of us raised to love books and print culture.

Seen together, are these two versions of the poem a comment on the future of the book in digital media? And since this work evokes the sonnet tradition, is the more recent iOS app a counterpoint to the Web version?

Book culture and sonnets are both centuries-old traditions. Are both stripped of their value and tradition in this conceptual poem?