Plays random sections of a recording of Wallace Stevens reading The Idea of Order at Key West. Click the waveform to play the poem at the corresponding point in time. Blue and green are special colors in the poetry of Stevens. Green for the earth, for nature, for the quotidian, the worldly. Blue for the sky, imagination, the ethereal, thought and dream.
“Clone-ing God & Ange-Lz” is graphical and scheduled in its presentation, transforming language and images in over time in ways that subvert traditional ways of portraying such figures. Short sound loops, animated images, and animated images of text with formatting and language changes enhance her mezangelle language practice with visual information, as can be seen in words like “prayah” (emphasis added 2.high[lite] the you.z of Y.t tXt in “ah”). (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
“Birdfall” deconstructs a single narrative sentence written in conventional English and slowly transforming it into mezangelle. As you scroll down the window to read each line and prose poetry paragraph, the language becomes stranger as she inserts extended passages in brackets inside of words, shifts spelling to homophones with different meanings, adds self-referential metatext that suggests links, and more. She uses animated GIFs in the background and foreground to signal to readers that there there are shifting intentions, language, and narrative— as if the ground on which this text is placed is unstable.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
This responsive (or “reactive” work as described in Megan Sapnar’s essay “Reactive Media Meets E-Poetry”) is a great example of a work that reacts to user input, though I’m not sure there’s enough of a language base to connect it to poetic tradition. Translated as “In the lion’s mouth” (though I feel “In the wolf’s mouth” is more accurate) this feels more like a visual art piece than a poem and I suspect Clauss would agree, since he describes his works in Flying Puppet as “tableaux interactifs” (interactive tableau). Regardless of classification, this is an engagingly atmospheric piece that invites interaction with a surreal payoff. Move the pointer and play with this work to discover what lies above and beneath the image and interface, considering all the layers involved. And don’t forget that you are one of those layers… (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
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)
A creative website that contains more than can be easily labelled as poetry, art, or narrative, though it certainly contains that and more. Launched in 1998, the site incorporates multiple Web technologies in very coherent fashion to create a hypertext of musings, anxieties, joys, searches for companionship, yearnings, and more navigable through interfaces populated by a variety of insects. Each page in this hypertext is a discovery: a thoughtful exploration of an idea through art, language, and metaphor. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
This kinetic collage poem is built out of text by Soderman and quotes from eight pieces written by theorists and writers whose work reflects upon the nature of writing in spaces other than the printed page. Cut into lines and blocks of text, each of these textual portions are anchored or set adrift in a “page_space” designed by Soderman to allow them to move and rearrange themselves into new textual combinations. In addition to encouraging readers to click on texts to get other quotes from the same source, Soderman places several objects into the space that trigger different events, such as a book that stops the textual movement when clicked. The behaviors triggered by each of the objects remind the readers of how configurable the space for digital writing can be by enacting some of the concepts brought forth by the quoted writers.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
This generative sonnet is inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes but takes a highly visual approach by using images of poets, book spines, and other images. The images are cropped into strips, much like the line-pages in Queneau’s book, an ideal proportion for book spines (see a similar treatment by Jody Zellen) and the photographed eyes of iconic poets. The lines respond to mouseovers, allowing you to change the work as needed.
(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)
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)
