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This poem is built over the song “Don’t Know Why” by Norah Jones, and takes its time doing so, with opening dedications, a slow-paced delivery of the poetic lines, and even some playful credits at the end. The poem’s linguistic text focuses on words used to denote possibilities, missed opportunities, second chances to create a tone similar to the last few sections of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but using language more fitting of “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town.” The lyrics in Norah Jones’ song enhance the melancholy tone, as well as the images of dusk turning into night and a flower losing its petals. So savor this unhurried poem and lose yourself for contemplation of its details, if only for the space of a song.

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

This interactive video poem highlights the use of collage that is so central to Web work that one of the first Web browsers was called Mosaic. This artistic technique builds a whole out of parts, much like a Web browser assembles a coherent display document out of different kinds of electronic objects, often in different locations on a network. Formats like Flash or Quicktime produce an illusion of unity by mixing together multiple elements and packaging them for export as a single proprietary file.

Miles shows the sutures in this 30 second looping Quicktime video by shaping the image as a roughly reassembled puzzle and by including four different sound tracks in four different locations. The music track is part of the original video, and its loudness can be controlled with the volume bar in the video window, but the voice recordings are loaded from a remote location and their loudness cannot be controlled. Since they play on an independent loop, they can be activated at any point in the 30 second video loop and continue to play uninterrupted when the video restarts. The lines of text in the video slowly float towards the left, but we can never read them completely because they restart at the end of the brief video loop, which is not enough to display the entire line. For that we need the vocal recordings, which enhance the sense that we are experiencing a work that is larger than its visual and aural dimensions.

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

This video poem is about how serious the undertones of a playful crush on celebrities can be. Each stanza that scrolls up the screen delivers a layer, perspective, or progression of the situation, starting with a Sunday afternoon routine for the couple whose desires shape the poem. A key strategy in the poem is to examine the focus of desire, within the couple, towards the radio celebrities, particularly their bodies, voices, and the idealized American Life they represent. Another is to deploy radio metaphors to reflect upon relationships, using images of tuning to stations, focusing on host and guest, and providing images of wavelengths, which suggest that while they are both tuned to the same station, they may be on different wavelengths. Or perhaps they are on the same frequency, that of ordinary life with routines and ruts, while desiring to be on another, represented by the radio stars they are attracted to. The implications for this relationship can be intuited by examining the language used to indicate proximity and distance— between each other, between them and their respective celebrities, and between their life and the one they dream of.

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

This emotional poem about heartache and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” particularly in the aftermath of a failed relationship. Lew takes the metaphor of emotional pain as being related to the heart and extends it to the realm of medicine, by referring to the speaker as “the subject” and creating an interface that suggests experimentation on or examination of that test subject. The image of bubbles (or are blood clots?) floating around the screen, is an interface for scheduled stanza sequences activated by a mouse click. The sound of a heart beating in the background and the poem that unfolds as you click on the bubble/clots (with 1 to 5 bubbles, which can be read sequentially or not) suggest that heart-stopping moment when one encounters a greeting card from a departed loved one.

This poem is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Medlars and Sorb-Apples,” because it examines the same phenomenon, though Lawrence comes to a different conclusion when he says “wonderful are the hellish experiences.”

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

This suite of three sound poems (or three-part poem) were inspired by Glenn Gould and his experiments with musique concrète. Nelson uses audio recordings of interviews on three topics— injuries, products, and robots— and places them on an interface that allows you to mix 8 clips at different volume levels and audio panning (sending signal to the left or right speakers). This can be used to listen to a single voice or place multiple voices in conversation, adjusting their virtual proximity (volume) and relative position in order to construct a sense of space in which people discuss a topic. Each interface is visually and thematically designed with a different background images, slider knobs, and an animated morphed image. The image above is from “Injury Analysis” and the following two are from “Product Sermon” and “Robot Party.”

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

This poem is mapped onto a nine tile sliding puzzle, the kind that traditionally has a single image that one can scramble or unscramble. The interface for this is the same, but Lewis throws a curve ball in this piece: every time the reader moves a tile— perhaps with the hope of completing the image— the image changes. One set of images is a photograph of Lewis himself, and another is a kind of map, suggesting that if we could complete it, we’d see him or where he’s from. But identity isn’t that simple to put together, particularly in the case of someone with such a diverse ethnic background as Lewis. Keep this idea in mind as you read the text as you attempt to complete the puzzle— will you get closure from this piece by completing the puzzle or is this denied much like easy answers about identity are to Lewis? (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This suite of two responsive visual poems are inspired by typography and phonetics, and the poetics of Concretism and Lettrism. “Vowel Submission” seeks to discover letters physically discoverable by breaking off portions of vowels. The interface leads readers to probe the space of the poem searching for triggers that will break the rotating vowels into the consonants that lie within. “Typespeak” is the more interesting piece because it vocalizes the sounds of each letter without combining them into words. In other words, one can type a word, but it will play as a simultaneous set of individual sounds. He turns the computer’s keyboard into an instrument that plays verbal notes from Madsen’s vocal apparatus. The random placement of brief letter animations on the screen also resists any attempts at writing words, a very Lettrist move because it subverts attempts at creating meaning.

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

This collaborative poem combines the Steve Matanle’s words and voice with Ingrid Ankerson’s music and design to produce a well integrated multimedia performance. The poem plays like a short film, requiring no interaction from the readers but commanding aural and visual attention with engaging music, a richly textured vocal performance, and visuals that enhance the experience of the poem. Some lines in the poem are punctuated by the appearance of text, brief animation sequences, and graphical information that enriches the imagery evoked in the spoken words. Timing is all in this brief poem which synchronizes its visuals with the music and rhythms of Matanle’s voice to tell a story of a forbidden love affair that is hurtling towards a destination as inevitable as the train tracks laid across the poem’s visual field.

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

What happens when you change a poem’s medium and context? Is it still the same poem? Ingrid Ankerson’s re-production of Raleigh’s poem suggests that it is not.

The first difference is that the “print” version of the poem is designed to direct the reader’s full attention to the written words on the page, with sounds emerging from reading the words, whether aloud or silently. That page is a kind of musical score, designed to produce a performance of musical language in the reader. Anderson’s version transforms the poem into a kind of film (even recreating some of the scratch and dust marks we see projected on movie screens), reformatting and scheduling its lines with pauses different from the kind evoked by the poem. The images of different species of prehistoric man, however, transform this poem the most by recontextualizing its message.

When Raleigh wrote this poem there were no theories of evolution (at least not the way we know them), no sense of a narrative that connected us to a diverse hominid fossil record. His poem may come across as a witty extended metaphor for our brief lives and beyond, as understood through the Christian beliefs of his time. To place this idea across geological time makes a bolder statement, particularly in the way we understand the speaker and Heaven.

Ankerson’s e-poem exemplifies the same concept Borges suggested in his short story “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quijote,” rethought for the digital age.

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

This responsive poem is structured into an 8 by 4 grid of thumbnail images. By placing the pointer over each square, the image is enlarged, presenting a line of poetry. Moving from square to square, the reader can create line combinations in multiple directions within this grid, creating new line combinations. The order in which one reads each combination can really change how one understands the text. As you read this e-poem, meditate on some of these relations between its beautifully juxtaposed elements: call and response, setup and surprise, subject and predicate, point and counterpoint, image and text, turn and volta.

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