Published on the Web (online gallery)

Content type
Author
Year
Publisher
Language
Record Status
Description (in English)

This short poem uses a backdrop of stars flickering and occasionally shooting in the background as lines of text flow up the screen accompanied by images that emphasize some aspects of the text. This is not a romanticized cool night sky with distant stars: its imagery emphasizes the heat of blazing suns. The speaker isn’t a Romantic poet gazing longingly at the unreachable: she describes us as “dangerous” burning as hotly as the stars themselves, but with hellish desire.

The desire to touch the stars is emphasized by the textual responsiveness as each line and stanza moves from the bottom to the top of the screen. Touch the lines with the pointer, and a hissing, loud, whisper of a voice reads the lines out loud, once for each contact, perhaps a reminder of how loud the burning of stars must sound, if sound could carry across such vast, empty, distances.

If we shift our focus from the macroscopic scale of the universe to the microscopic scale of electrical impulses, are those untouchable pixels flickering on the screen equally distant?

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

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Year
Publisher
Language
Record Status
Description (in English)

This poem plays like a short video in which each line is fades in and out of the window, moving or remaining static, with or without the company of another line. The speaker is a young adult who is faced with a vivid image of the reality of being independent— a sink full of dirty dishes— which triggers a memory of learning to swim in Lake Michigan with her mother. Swimming becomes a metaphor for independent adult life in a poem which explores its parallels in revealing ways for both the speaker and her mother. The minimalist video background and music create an important sense of progression that sets the tone for a powerful final line in the poem that should send you right back to replaying the video poem to decide what happens at the end. Does she sink or swim?

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

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Description (in English)

This video poem is a meditation on breath, life, and death inspired by Buddha’s teachings, which may or may not have expired. The poem uses simple animations suggestive of the swelling of a chest as one draws breath, the thinness that comes from letting it out, and the burning of a cigarette. Aptly paced for the meditative contemplation of words, and lines, the poem begins with a quote from Buddha, emphasizing some of its language through animation and scheduling, and then presenting a response from the speaker, who sits at a bar stool, savoring some of the guilty pleasures life has to offer. As you read (and reread) this concise lyric poem, think of what it’s doing with certain binary opposites: exhale/inhale, life/death, outside/inside, and via negativa / via positiva. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Author
Year
Publisher
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

This poem is inspired by the phone conversations made by telemarketing representatives whose peak calling hours were in the early evening, when people are having dinner and perhaps unwinding with a glass of wine after a long day’s work. Written and published in 2001, this poem captures some of the frustration and unexpected human connections that occurred in these contexts before the National Do Not Call Registry was implemented in the U.S. in 2004, effectively ending that kind of telemarketing strategy. Clicking on each pictorial icon triggers a sequence of animated, scheduled text, with accompanying images and music, told from the perspective of each of the two women who seem to find unexpected pleasure in their weekly phone conversations. At least during this time in the history of telemarketing, the phone technology allowed for human interactions, sometimes cordial, sometimes providing opportunities for cathartic venting of pent up frustrations, and occasionally, very rarely, genuine connections and empathy. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Author
Year
Publisher
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

This poem focuses on one stanza from Swinburne’s poem of the same name to explore its theme in more detail. Upon loading the e-poem, an image of a garden appears with the text of the 11th stanza (out of 12), but the image immediately becomes darker and muted in its colors, perhaps to reinforce the notion of how life fades. Proserpine, famous for being tricked by Hades into being his wife by eating pomegranate seeds, now plants seeds whose fruit brings death to all to consume it. Yet this is not necessarily a bad thing, as this stanza points out, since everything— even endless flowing rivers— needs that final rest. McCabe’s interface is very simple yet manages to direct our attention to each line of the poem by enlarging the lines whenever we place our mouse over them and returning them to their small original size and position when we move the pointer away. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Year
Publisher
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

This video poem is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “Tree at My Window” with its treatment of internal and external weather. The speaker of the poem is experiencing a metaphorical winter of the soul, exploring the idea poetically, visually, and musically (using “Hymn” by Moby). The scheduling of textual elements and their movement and duration onscreen focuses the reader’s attention on the idea expressed in each line, creating a sequence of ideas that change over time. This allows for turns, shifts, reversals, and re-imaginings, much like the layering of images used by Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” but in time rather than in space. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Year
Publisher
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

This delicately layered poem builds upon the Persephone myth (briefly told at the beginning of the poem) to reflect on the universal experience of losing a daughter to adulthood and marriage. The visual image in the poem seems to be from a Demeter-like perspective as she sees the faded memory of her little girl, with muted colors and seemingly underwater. The poem progresses by gently directing readers to move the pointers over certain parts of the image, which triggers brief sound and textual sequences that explore the speaker’s state of mind. We also get layers of other images fading in and out, of a grown young woman and a bare field, both of which allude to the myth. This is a powerfully archetypal poem, using the technology to evoke a moment that should resonate with parents of grown children everywhere. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Year
Publisher
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

This is a heart-wrenching poem that radically recontextualizes Rengetsu’s Tanka (short poems) by juxtaposing it with sounds and voices from the September 11, 2001 attacks. The poem’s title animation presents the letters in the title descending and coalescing into words that reflect on a suggested surface below, using a background of soft night colors, the moon, and night sounds. Three things subvert the serene initial scene: the night sky contains a jet’s vapor trails, and for a few seconds, a highly transparent image of the burning Twin Towers fades in and out right before the date 09.11.01 appears. This juxtaposition and superposition in time and space of images, sounds, and words is the main strategy for constructing a powerful mix of frames of reference, separated by gulfs of time, place, and human experience. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Description (in English)

This unique performance of Tennyson’s dramatic poem “Maud” uses programming with OpenGL and other “abandonware” to produce an audiovisual reading. Part of what this work underscores is the nature of digital data, such as the words of Tennyson’s poem. Each letter, space, and line break is represented by the computer as a sequence of 1s and 0s, the on/off signals of binary code. The thing about computers is that it can then use that code to reproduce the same sequence of characters visually, or can use that code to produce different kinds of output. Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones have created a program to read “Maud” performing the poem as an audio-visual conceptual art video. But this is not simply a machine reading what it can’t comprehend, it is also a visualization tool that allows Rodgers, Jones, and us to see and hear things in the poem that we wouldn’t notice in a vocal performance or text-to-speech rendition. And it is also an instrument they have shaped and customized to produce the documented performances through videos. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Description in original language
I ♥ E-Poetry entry
Screen shots
Image
Content type
Year
Language
Platform/Software
Record Status
Description (in English)

В романе "Бледное пламя" соединились воедино набоковские интересы и пристрастия различных эпох. С одной стороны, как и "Под знаком незаконнорожденных", "Бледное пламя" вобрало в себя осколки последнего незавершенного русскоязычного романа "Solus Rex". С другой, избранная сложная наукообразная форма: предисловие комментатора Чарльза Кинбота, поэма из 999 строк, авторство которой, по-видимому, принадлежит Джону Шейду, пространный комментарий и указатель, составленные опять-таки Кинботом, — напоминает о рождавшемся в те годы масштабном труде Набокова -- комментированном издании "Евгения Онегина", включавшем в свой состав предисловие, текст перевода, комментарии, указатель и факсимильную версию первой прижизненной публикации пушкинского романа. (из А.Люксембург, С.Ильин. Комментарий к роману "Бледное пламя")

Pull Quotes

"Бледное пламя", поэма в героических куплетах объемом в девятьсот девяносто девять строк, разделенная на четыре песни, написана Джоном Фрэнсисом Шейдом (р. 5 июля 1898-го года, ск. 21 июля 1959-го года) в последние двадцать дней его жизни у себя дома в Нью-Вае, Аппалачие, США. Рукопись (это по преимуществу беловик), по которой набожно воспроизводится предлагаемый текст, состоит из восьмидесяти справочных карточек среднего размера, на которых верхнюю, розовую полоску Шейд отводил под заголовок (номер песни, дата), а в четырнадцать голубых вписывал тонким пером, почерком мелким, опрятным и удивительно внятным, текст поэмы, пропуская полоску для обозначения двойного пробела и начиная всякий раз новую песнь на свежей карточке.

Screen shots
Image