Allison Clifford – I ❤️ E-Poetry

Open “The Sweet Old Etcetera” by Allison Clifford

Clifford’s lovingly produced Flash versions of E. E. Cummings’ poetry are a tribute to the poet’s playfulness and experimentation with language. In each piece, she has sought to highlight a feature of Cummings’ poetry: his idiosyncratic use of parentheses, capitalization, and spacing on the page, his way of directing the reader’s gaze to mimic the drift of a leaf to the ground, or the saccadic eye movements hopping from letter to letter trying to assemble them into something that makes sense, and more. For Cummings, the typewriter was his toy of choice to shape language. Clifford’s homage allows us to imagine E. E. Cummings creating poetry in the digital age, but it shines best in those graceful touches that are all her own.

Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

Screen capture from "The Sweet Old Etcetera" by Allison Clifford. Landscape with red skies, two white clouds, a withered tree and some hills composed of lines of text too small to read. — Abrir “The Sweet Old Etcetera” by Allison Clifford

Las versiones en Flash que Clifford tiernamente produjo de la poesía de E.E. Cummings son un tributo a la jocosidad y la experimentación del poeta con el lenguaje. En cada pieza, ella buscó resaltar una característica de la poesía de Cummings: su uso idiosincrático de los paréntesis, de la capitalización, y del espaciado en una página, su manera de dirigir la mirada del lector para imitar el giro de una hoja al suelo, o los movimientos oculares sacádicos, saltando de letra a letra tratando de ensamblarlas en algo que tenga sentido, entre otras. Para Cummings, la máquina de escribir fue su juguete preferido para darle forma al lenguaje. El homenaje de Clifford nos permite a imaginar a E.E. Cummings creando poesía en la edad digital, aunque el trabajo de Clifford, con sus toques elegantes, brilla con luz propia.

Exhibido en Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

Traducido por Julianna Canabal-Rodríguez