Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
Open: “Urbanalities” by Babel vs. Escha
This “short story-poem-comic strip-musical” by Chris Joseph and María Colino consists of 10 highly stylized Flash pieces in the Dada and Constructivist traditions. Two particularly arresting poems are “River” and “Sex/Conception” (see images above) because of how they use their images and randomly generated texts.
Open “Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar
The simple yet unexplained interface for this sexy Flash poem is a metaphor for the subject of the poem—kids who barely know how to drive (or interact romantically) cruising in a small town in Wisconsin— because the reader is also a novice on how to read and navigate this poem.
The guitar music and clear voice delivering the aural version of the poem, presented simultaneously with the visual text the reader must learn to traverse in order to read, and the pictures of cars, streets, and neon signs combine well to deliver an immersive, and very hip, experience.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, Poems That GO.
Open “Stir Fry Texts” by Jim Andrews
With this series of collaborative e-poems, Andrews uses the cut up, an important technique in his poetics that aligns him with the work of William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Raymond Queneau, and Surrealism. His ingredients include e-mails, quotes, concrete poetry, and essay like writing, lovingly sliced with DHTML programming tools. Jim Andrews and his collaborators prep the texts for stir frying, cutting and linking where they see fit. The computer provides the energy to run the scripts and heat up the surface on which the texts are displayed. The reader’s hand, by way of the mouse and its virtual pointer on the screen’s surface, stirs the texts, cooking them up into new combinations and possibilities for his/her consumption.
For more on the Stir Fry Texts and a close reading of “Spastext” read “Cut Up, Heat, Stir” in my dissertation (pgs. 184-205).
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
Open “On Lionel Kearns” by Jim Andrews
In this piece, Jim Andrews curates and meditates on a selection of proto-digital poems by Lionel Kearns from the 1960s to the present. Heavily influenced by McLuhan, Kearns intuited that “if one messes around enough with the physical form of language (either spoken or written), eventually you get to the point where it (the language) drops its load of conventional reference” and created works of visual and sound poetry “right on that edge, where language begins to work into either music or visual art.”
Open “Nio” by Jim Andrews
As a sound and visual poem in the Lettriste tradition, Nio consists of a set of glyphs made of stacked letters, each of which plays its own musical phrase— a recording of Andrews’ voice— and its own animation. Verse One allows readers to layer sounds and animation, while Verse Two allows both layering and sequencing.