Published on the Web (online gallery)

This piece is one of those rare examples of e-poems that exhibits the same textual behaviors as a print text— purely static— yet is created through such a creative engagement with the medium that it merits consideration as e-literature. Its visual design is evocative of both programming conventions (particularly the practice of numbering lines of code) and of green monochrome monitors. The numbering of its lines and stanzas, with two notable exceptions, obey a simple formal logic yet add programming texture and structure to the poem. The cluster of 10 lines beginning with “x01,” each of which is divided into four columns breaks the numbering pattern, simultaneously offering a visual structure that could be read as lines or columns. This is framed by two identically numbered 2-line stanzas (010801 & 010802) which contain different texts but are formatted on left and right hand margins of the window.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This linear hypertext poetic project is structured by the constraint of following the germination of beans over the course of 23 days, while learning Web design with Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. Each day, Black builds a page using daily photographs of the beans and writing a poem inspired by her impressions of the beans that day.

There is an infectious youthfulness to the project as we see the beans sprout, take root and grow both in the beer glass and in Black’s mind. The page designs and poems are playful, experimenting with layout, line breaks, incorporating images, and with simple animation layers. The ending comes as a shock with an unexpected reversal that has little to do with beans but much to do with an important function of pets for children.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This scheduled poem is built around a quote from James Elkins’ 1999 book, The Domain of Images, in which he analyzes the blurred boundaries between images and writing.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This hypertext poem gives a voice to Jesus as he questions the narrative path he is in and decides not to follow in it. The central metaphorical motif in this poem— to follow in someone’s footsteps (in this case in the father)— has particularly powerful resonance when applied to Jesus and Jehovah. For Jesus to follow in his father’s footsteps is to become a god through painful self-sacrifice, but in this poem, Jesus seeks to make his own path as a human being.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This aural piece is a kind of Lettrist sound poem, because it uses verbal language in sub-morphemic units (with thanks to Melissa Lucas for the term). In other words, the poem is concerned with putting together snippets of vocalized language sounds that don’t carry semantic meaning, all performed a capella, recorded, edited, and spatially arranged by Jim Andrews. The visual composition is as non-referential as the sounds, activated by moving the pointer over the pulsating colored squares.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This hypertext poem makes clever use of HTML in its design to tell the story of a speaker’s associations with a place in in the Louisiana bayou, relationships, and the moon. This piece is designed for a 500 x 500 pixel window and uses the now discontinued frame tag to separate the space into navigation (bottom) and textual (top) frames.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This aural poem about a speaker’s perception of a bar fight is arranged on a visually minimalist interface that allows readers to experience both the chaos of the event and the calm recollection of it afterwards. Each circle (or is it the letter O?) contains two areas that respond to mouseovers. The circumference triggers the playback of a recorded line of speech that tells a piece of the story. The center triggers a loud diegetic sound that takes the narrative beyond being a language constructed event to something that feels real. You can trigger more than one sound clip simultaneously, by the way, and if you move your mouse pointer rapidly over the whole piece, you can create a truly chaotic mess of sound and information— perhaps like the experience of a bar fight.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The minimalist design for this poem concentrates attention on the visual while it evokes all the senses with its language choices. There is only one input cue at the opening of the poem a white dot in the faint gray background that triggers the poem’s slowly scheduled display of language. The pace at which lines fade in and out creates a layered meditative experience and the words instruct readers to imagine a space, do things with their bodies, and become aware of how it leads to sensory experience. Pay attention to the rhythm established by the fading language and to the rhetorical and semantic pattern Knoebel creates with the poem so you can really appreciate how he breaks both patterns with a single powerfully sensuous word.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This poem interweaves voices, images, words, and narrative threads to capture some of the emotional intensity of three characters in a relationship that seems to have ended. As an image-driven hypertext, the reader can click on different links usually associated with different characters to explore their thoughts. Each node has its own input cues and responds to mouse movements, mouseovers, and clicks differently, so explore the possibilities of each before clicking on too hastily or you might miss important lines in the poem. Some of the images take some interpretation and are not always clear in what they represent, enriching the experience by suggesting rather than showing. The use of handwriting and drawings also enhances a sense of the personal, and occasionally adds a layer of visual ambiguity (does she use the word “connections” or “corrections?”). The handwriting also masks a number of typos which are difficult to correct when processed as an animated image in Flash (an issue addressed in Jhave’s “Typeoms”).

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

"I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room."

The quote from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an important motif in this poem by Safavian, inspired by overheard cell phone conversations. These conversations are intimately private yet their delivery in public spaces make them “become part of the poetry of public, everyday life,” according to Safavian. This idea of private confessions getting out into the world is a theme parallelled in Prufrock, which in turn references Guido da Montefeltro’s words in Dante’s Inferno (see the epigraph).

Safavian uses Photoshop filtered photographs of places in Baltimore to provide a setting and context to six voices, whose lines appear statically on the screen while a kinetic lines cascade or rise softly through the screen with verses that come from another speaker’s voice which reflects upon the overheard lines. This unifying voice is a layer that helps unify the poem, as is the image of the Baltimore skyline, and two layers of audio: a short musical loop that plays for several minutes and a lower volume voice loop of poetry. If you cannot make out the sotto voice track, you may want to wait for the music loop to end to appreciate it and its resonance in the poem.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)