Earlier this year, I received an intriguing invitation from Soham Patel — the Editor-in-Chief of The New River Journal — and Nurain Ọládèjì — the student editor who selected the poem — to collaborate with Nigerian poet Abu Bakr Sadiq on “a new section in each issue that we are currently calling ‘collaborative refractions,’ a project in which we take a ‘traditional’ submission and work to ‘elitify’ it.” Read more about this in the Editor’s Note.

The New River Journal is the oldest continuously operating electronic literature publication in the field — founded by Ed Falco over 30 years ago — and this collaborative refraction is part of a redesign for the journal that creates a bridge between traditional and electronic literature. And Sadiq’s poem is such a tender, intimate poem about distance in a relationship that it instantly got my e-poetic creative brain going. Readers, I jumped on the opportunity! And so began a fruitful collaboration that resulted in this publication of the poem in the landmark 50th issue of The New River Journal.

Before our first meeting, I focused on carefully reading the poem and thinking of ways in which the digital presentation could focus the reader’s attention on Abu Bakr’s carefully chosen words, phrases, verses, strophes, and tactical use of space on the page. I worked with ChatGPT to create an initial code engine that would reveal the poem over time and shared that sketch with him. That became the basis for fruitful meetings in which we explored different ways of further enhancing specific features of the poem, as we hand and vibe coded using VS Code and GitHub Copilot to test and adjust different ideas until we had achieved our vision. In our conversations with the editors, we considered adding elements of sound, a recorded reading, and a potential translation into Spanish, but decided to keep the focus on the presentation of the language to guide the reader’s own dance with the poem.

You can read the e-poem here.

And then we had the pleasure of being interviewed by Lauren Emo and Makenzie Anderson for The New River Podcast, resulting in two episodes that came out in June:

• The Future of E-Lit, with Leo Flores (Apple, Spotify)
• Writing the Cyborg, with Abu Bakr Sadiq (Apple, Spotify)

You can learn more about our process — and much more — in these wonderfully researched and produced interviews.

Enjoy!