David Knoebel – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“@Postmeaning” by David Knoebel (part 2 of 2)

February 23, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Note: This is the second in a series of 2 postings on “Postmeaning.” Here’s a link to the first entry.

…stmeaning” also via Twitter, starting on June 11, 2011, providing a snippet of the 100 word text and a link to the note or audio file in the Facebook page. An interesting detail about the Twitter via Facebook publication is that it cuts the 100-word posting down to a aize Twitter could manage, including making room for the shortened link and ellipsis. This creates a secondary cut, one that isn’t designed by Knoebel, which potentially creates a new textual iteration which could be interpreted differently from the original. Perhaps this accounts for the shift to shorter entries on July 21, which creates a direct concordance between the Facebook and Twitter texts, while at the same time allowing them to develop different audiences by eliminating the link to the Facebook Page.

“@Postmeaning” by David Knoebel (part 1 of 2)

February 22, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

ose poem is published serially through a Facebook page which gathers all of its postings in its timeline since it began on February 27, 2011. The writing is surreal at times, mixing topics and language in ways that are grammatical but obeying an almost dreamlike logic, like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Since its launching, every single one of its daily (or almost-daily) postings begins an ends with an incomplete sentence and even word, evoking a sense that it is part of a larger thought or text, yet there is no grammatical connection between any entry and the ones before or after.

“White Room” by David Knoebel

October 30, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

The minimalist design for this poem concentrates attention on the visual while it evokes all the senses with its language choices. There is only one input cue at the opening of the poem a white dot in the faint gray background that triggers the poem’s slowly scheduled display of language. The pace at which lines fade in and out creates a layered meditative experience and the words instruct readers to imagine a space, do things with their bodies, and become aware of how it leads to sensory experience. Pay attention to the rhythm established by the fading language and to the rhetorical and semantic pattern Knoebel creates with the poem so you can really appreciate how he breaks both patterns with a single powerfully sensuous word.

Featured in Cauldron & Net.

“How I Heard It” by David Knoebel

October 29, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This aural poem about a speaker’s perception of a bar fight is arranged on a visually minimalist interface that allows readers to experience both the chaos of the event and the calm recollection of it afterwards. Each circle (or is it the letter O?) contains two areas that respond to mouseovers. The circumference triggers the playback of a recorded line of speech that tells a piece of the story. The center triggers a loud diegetic sound that takes the narrative beyond being a language constructed event to something that feels real. You can trigger more than one sound clip simultaneously, by the way, and if you move your mouse pointer rapidly over the whole piece, you can create a truly chaotic mess of sound and information— perhaps like the experience of a bar fight.

Featured in Cauldron & Net.

“Four Letter Words” by David Knoebel

February 7, 2019October 9, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Open “Four Letter Words” by David Knoebel

This combinatorial poem uses random words arranged on a grid changing in seemingly random at different time intervals. The word in the center of the grid distinguishes itself, not only by position, but by its slight overlap with the word that is to replace it. This film technique known as a dissolve adds a layer of depth to the transition by having a 10th word juxtaposed (superposed, really) and by visually representing the time-based mechanism in the poem. The title plays with a double meaning: words that are culturally considered obscene or insulting, and with a constraint of using words with only four letters (see this Scrabble dictionary). Knoebel seems to be foregrounding the latter, thought initially the title points towards the former meaning.

“Thoughts Go” by David Knoebel

March 14, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This is poem is Knoebel’s most powerful use of simultaneity because he layers two stanzas of poetry in a perfectly synchronized fashion. One stanza is an abstract meditation on the presence, absence, and storage of thoughts while the other is pure imagery and embodied experience. The two are connected by being displayed and spoken through time, initially scrambling your thought process as it tries to follow two threads of text.

After your first reading of this short poem, I suggest you turn off the sound and read the visual text and then turn the sound back on and simply listen to the other stanza. Then experience them simultaneously again to see how meaningful the layering is, how the scheduling of the text leads you to re-imagine some of the sounds, and how the central metaphor brings the whole poem together.

“The Click Poems” by David Knoebel

March 13, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

These are among David Knoebel’s earliest e-poems, going back to 1997, but they’re important because their conceptual compression and technical simplicity set the tone for Knoebel’s subsequent poetry. Inspired by the haiku, they consist of three words or short phrases: a first line (which serves as a title) linking to the second line (which loads as an HTML page) and a third line which plays as an audio recording as soon as the sound file loads— which is almost simultaneously.

These crisp little poems are built out of layering in virtual and computational space and time. As you read them, notice how just as your brain is making the conceptual connection between the first two lines it gets hit by the third, transforming your thought process. Between the three, Knoebel maps out little experiences that resonate with humor, wit, curiosity, and delight. The relationship between the lines vary as well: completing phrases, commenting on the previous pair of lines, or making a connection to nature (in good haiku tradition).

“Euclid” by David Knoebel

March 12, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

This VRML piece is a meditation on Euclidean geometry, matter, mortality, eternity and language in all of these contexts. It consists of two spaces, the first of which we experience as a movie that displays four stanzas, each of which expresses Euclidean elements: solid, plane, line, point. The next space is intriguing because it has the four words above, plus two more words, all surrounding a cube made of clusters of 2-3 letters. Navigate this space when the initial movie ends, seeing the different views, and you’ll get the point of what Knoebel is trying to express with this minimalist poem in a virtual environment.

“Walkdont” by David Knoebel

March 11, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Part of his “Words in Space” series, this poem uses VRML to position two dimensional words in different three dimensional rotational axes and provides a minimalist interface for the reader to switch between two types of rotation or movement, signaling the change with an audible click.

The spiraling of the words around a central axis and around each other mimic the speaker’s thought process as he obsesses over what seems to have been a traumatic incident. If we extend the idea of word rotation to its static title, we could read it as “walkdont,” as “dontwalk,” or over time as “walkdontwalkdontwalkdontwalkdont” an idea reinforced by the use of color in three key words and phrases punctuated by the blue “Who knew?”

Now you turn the words around in your head until you figure out what happened…

“Walkdont” por David Knoebel

February 13, 2019March 11, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Parte de su serie “Palabras en el espacio”, este poema usa VRML para colocar palabras bidimensionales en diferentes ejes rotacionales tridimensionales y proporciona una interfaz minimalista para que el lector cambie entre dos tipos de rotación o movimiento, señalando el cambio con un clic audible .

La espiral de las palabras alrededor de un eje central y una alrededor de la otra imitan el proceso de pensamiento del hablante mientras se obsesiona con lo que parece haber sido un incidente traumático. Si ampliamos la idea de rotación de palabras a su título estático, podríamos leerlo como “walkdont”, como “dontwalk”, o con el tiempo como “walkdontwalkdontwalkdontwalkdont”, una idea reforzada por el uso del color en tres palabras clave y frases puntuadas por el azul “¿Quién sabía?”

Ahora vuelves las palabras en tu cabeza hasta que descubras lo que pasó …

Traducido por Reina Santiago