Published on the Web (online journal)

Eight attempts in understanding what a book is.

A virtual lexicon of contemporary culture rhetoric. Each word is explained or illustrated through image, sound, text, animation or interactivity. Style and characteristics of each entry can vary from the highly informative to the satirical and humorous.

This is a collaboration across centuries between the 13th century Persian mystic and poet known as Rumi, whose silky lines of poetry appear beneath Zahra Safavian’s 3 by 3 grid of tiles with short looping videos and words— an interface for meditation on this poem’s idea. Rumi is credited with inventing the meditative poetic practice of “the turn” by dancing to the rhythm of the hammering of the goldsmiths. Rumi’s poems are usually organized into couplets, not necessarily rhyming, clustered into variable stanzas, and tend to establish a conversation between self and other, self and the world. Each tile can be clicked to reveal another word and video, representing perhaps some of the dualities expressed in the concept of the “turn,” though we are not dealing with binary opposites— the associations are more diverse than that. The three lines that appear after interacting with the short videos on the grid reinforce that idea, separating awareness of the head and the feet, each turning on its own, uncaring what the other does, as with a baby nursing. Lose yourself in contemplation of this beautifully meditative piece, considering the relation between videos and words, words and their pairs, word combinations, and the relation between the tiles and the lines by Rumi. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This kinetic concrete poem, along with its companion piece “Paddle”, is a minimalist statement of how meaningful the movement of words can be. Using three words with simple animation, Hennessy is able to build a narrative of the formation of a puddle and what happens after. The timing and spacing of the downward flow of language in this poem sets up a variation in the final part of the poem, as we get a little bit of upwards movement, combined with an insight on the shared etymology (or orthography) of the first and final words in the poem.

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

This kinetic poem is takes the ancient rhetorical and poetic device of the dialogue to investigate the virtual, conceptual, and perceptual spaces of programmable media. Inspired by theoretical writings by John Cayley and Jean-François Lyotard, this poem explores binaries between past and present, old and new, letter and word, simple and complex writing surfaces, and the right and left eye— each of which has a distinct voice and perspective on the topic.

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

In this kinetic poem, the lines rise before our eyes like bubbles from a diver exploring the depths of a reservoir. The words in each line are formatted using size and position to direct the readers’ attention towards nouns, verbs, and adjectives, while de-emphasizing articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. The arrangement of each poetic or phrasal line into multiple lines clustered and spaced like stanzas makes the commas at the end of each seem vestigial, when the spatial and chronological dimensions create such a paused pace for the poem. There is something eerie about this poem, involving a tall drowned pecan tree, a bass, and man— a fellow diver, perhaps? Dive into this poem a few times and see what literal and symbolic things you discover in its depths. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This delightfully cinematic poem from 2001 is very much of the now, or as Ezra Pound famously said of literature, “news that STAYS news.” The poem connects several trains of thought, aurally and through temporal juxtaposition, dealing with themes of war, changing generations, naps, routine, media, and all the noise that drowns us out. The verbal part of the poem is delivered crisply through the audio track along with a catchy beat, and the visual language emphasizes certain words and phrases layered over composite images and video. Layers and loudness are an important strategy, especially when the music’s volume rises to overwhelm the voice before subsiding to allow the speaker to utter a final line (and visual information) that helps pull the poem together. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This found poem is built from language in roadside garbage (specifically “pieces that had been in people’s mouths”) found and selected by Chris Green during a 30 minute walk during the first day of Spring in the year 2000. The lines composed from this fascinating set of constraints are a snapshot of what litterbugs in central Kentucky were eating in their cars or as they walked by a road— a kind of poetic ethnography. Each line of this poem is superposed over an artistic photograph that shows a portion of the found object and contains a footnote for each describing the object in the photograph and poetic line. The interface is a horizontally scrolling slideshow on a brief timer (that pauses while you place the pointer over the footnote), evoking the sequential structure of a walk. One fascinating aspect of this poem is how the punctuation between lines creates relations between the lines that might otherwise be lost, given an interface that promotes individual attention to each “slide.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)