For the past three years, Jhave has been using his Twitter account as a platform for a poetic constraint. Whenever a person follows him (that is, not a ‘bot) he writes a tweet poem that is exactly 140 character long. As one can see in All My Tweets, he had started this practice before, but committed to it on February 8, 2010— “continuing the anti-pragmatic stance of twitting (doesn’t that sound absurd?) only whn followed by a non-robot and always with exact letters”— and has since adhered strictly to the constraint.
The first version of the Know app was named after, designed for, and published a single poem: Lewis’ “Buzz Aldrin Doesn’t Know Any Better.” For version 2.0, he commissioned five poets to produce new poems with the authoring system. Here are some noteworthy observations on how they mapped out the app’s parameters.
David Jhave Johnston went to two minimalist extremes: using single word lines to produce a legible sentence while limiting the effect of the touch interface to two words in “4 Pound” (depicted above), and by using touch to make words move on such wide orbits that they effectively disappear.
J.R. Carpenter uses the structure to create a kind of semantic word cloud full of binary opposites in “Twinned Notions,” and in “up from the deep” conceptually maps the interface as a sea of words which the reader can pull maritime themed verse out into readability with touch and drag gestures.
Jason Camlot’s “Debaucher’s Chivalric Villanelle” draws connections between the repetitive structure of the villanelle and the repetitions of lines that occur because of the challenges of having overlaid language that can be activated by touch.
Jerome Fletcher’s “K Now” (depicted above) uses larger orbits for the words to move, creating space for legibility without needing to touch the screen, though touching any word brings out entire lines to the foreground for readers to better appreciate their sonorous approximations.
Loss Pequeño Glazier’s colorful polyglot “What Dragonfly Doesn’t Savoir Faire” uses multiple colors to signal slightly different behavior from the orbiting words— the red ones remain in the foreground, but the blue ones rotate with the white ones, occasionally becoming obscured. He also provides different instructions for the drag function, subverting the expected response from the interface. (Note also that either the app or iOS are unable to recognize or reproduce the character for accented letters.)
The structure of a word cloud from which one can pull lines through touch is a remarkably versatile structure and it would benefit from a version that allows readers to explore it with their own texts and controls, as they did with the Speak app.
“Speak App” by Jason Edward Lewis and Bruno Nadeau
“Speak Poems” by Jason Edward Lewis, Bruno Nadeau, Jim Andrews, David Jhave Johnston, J.R. Carpenter, and Aya Karpinska
This suite of poems by several prominent writers in the e-lit community was written using the Speak app, an authoring system developed by Lewis and Nadeau. This is the first in the P.o.E.M.M series (Poems for Excitable Mobile Media), a series of apps designed to explore the expressive, artistic, and publication potential of Apple’s iOS computational environment, Store, and touchscreen devices. The app opens to “What They Speak When They Speak to Me,” Lewis & Nadeau’s original touchscreen poem for large installations. The app offers other poems as well as the option for readers to explore the system by entering texts. Considering the effort that goes into creating computational frameworks for e-lit works, it is a great idea to open them up for further writerly interventions. It is therefore worthwhile to see what four talented writers have done and how their own poetics and thematic concerns are expressed through this framework. The main observable variables are font and lines of text, which readers access in different portions and sequences.
In “Character,”Jim Andrews writes meta textual lines from the personified poem’s voice that focus the reader’s attention on the interface.
Jhave’s “Let Me Tell You What Happened” reveals fragments of a situation that most people would find difficult to speak about.
Carpenter juxtaposes two very different conceptual frames evoked by her poem’s title, “Muddy Mouth.”
Karpinska’s “The Color of Your Hair Is Dangerous” explores linguistic slippages resulting from speaking multiple languages.
It is worth noting that all five poets (including Lewis) engage the theme of speech, structuring their lines to allow readers to intuit their structure. They help map out the framework’s rhetorical potential.
This powerfully expressive nonverbal poem builds on the title, with the dancers’ actions and movements in front of a video produced by Jhave. The first meaning of bindings is clear as the dancers come on stage boung by strips of fabric or are bound by other dancers. This act is portrayed in different ways— forcefully, gently, voluntarily, but never cruelly— yet the soft materials seem very effective in handicapping the dancers, who continue to dance oddly, as if exploring their new bodily conditions. As the piece progresses they are all freed, yet this seems to bring no solace to their bodies, which continue moving awkwardly. Why?
This poem showcases Jhave’s talent for delicately combining theory, science, and intensely personal material in a native digital multimedia poem. The subtitle for this poem is ” a confession of carnal confusion concerning an absence of cognition” which he explains is the result of encountering “The Medium is the Message” as a teenager and being sexually aroused by one of its images. He also critiques that “most humanities scholars (McLuhan included) are ignorant of the raw technical complexity of neurology and data plumbing.” Considering that Jhave has named his website Glia after an essential component of the nervous system called Neuroglia, it is clear that he knows a thing or two about the brain and its mechanisms.
This poetic sequence is built around 15 typos, a hilariously plausible definition for each, and spam. Every time one clicks on the button, the program generates two short poems that incorporate the typo and offers a definition for it, each framed by a box, positioned in visually diverse ways and shifting previously generated “typeoms.” It seems like the 3 or 4 word titles are generated from the same Spam site as used in “Spam Heart,” and the poems are generated on a handful of templates and line structures, inserting and featuring the typo in boldface.
This poem by Jhave about the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster considers how humanity becomes extinct by destroying the environment so thoroughly that the world and we become unrecognizable. The speaker’s characteristically concise, witty, emotionally charged voice points out the attitudes, loss, and processes that bring about the end of man(un)kind. After reading the 27 short parts of the poem, hovering over beautifully desolate videos, Jhave inserts a little mutability into the poem, a slow accumulation of random words replacing words randomly, increasing by a factor of one word substitution per mutation level. The image above shows the title with a level 2 mutation, while the image below shows mutation level of 20.
This poem is divided into 6 parts, each one a 4-line stanza that asks or answers a series of questions “in a wired way,” providing the linguistic text of the poems in a way that provides a traditional counterpoint to the presentation. This poem is “wired” in several ways:
This generative poem is built from “spam, code, thesis work, and a little bit of language’s heart.” Each part of the poem is organized into three strophes: the first one uses a larger font, the second one consists of a single word, and the third uses three words. Upon opening the poem, the first strophe is selected randomly from a dataset, after which it begins a sequence that reads coherently from one textual generation to the next. The second and third strophes are always independently randomly selected from their datasets, creating new textual combinations with the constant sequence in the first strophe.
This deceptively simple poem contains a limited number of verses scheduled to change from one to the next so rapidly that all but the unchanging final line is unreadable, unless you click and hold the mouse button, which stops the text. That is all the control one has, basically allowing random access to the verses. Fortunately for those who value closure, this is not a combinatorial work at the level of the line (which would probably create more permutations than could be read in a lifetime of clicking), but at the level of accessing the verses, which don’t seem like they have a meaningful sequence and progression. In other words, one can click on the poem enough times to get access to all or most of the verses and formulate a sense of what Jhave is trying to say with the poem.
