This delightfully creative website 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 (see tags below) 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.
His careful attention to words in many shapes, meanings, and behaviors gestures towards Concrete, Letterist, and even manuscript poetic traditions. Thematically, this work in the confessional poetry tradition, a type of lyric poetry focused on the construction of the self through the revelation of inner thoughts and emotions. Niemandsverdriet’s approach is delicately personal, occasionally musical, highly visual, and self-deprecatingly playful.
Has he broken free from traditional artistic and literary genres to create something new? Has the website form matured enough to become an artistic genre in and of itself?
