Language Skill

This category will determine which language skill can be practiced in the classroom by using this work as a pedagogical resource.

“The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans

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Open “The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans

This 11-minute silent film in Flash is a second-generation response to an essay by Rachel Blau DuPlessis about an essay on sexuality by erotic novelist Dodie Bellamy. His initial response to DuPlessis’ piece was to extract its words, place them in alphabetical order, and write a series of concrete poems with them (available here). Fortunately for us, he was unsatisfied with the result and created this graceful work of kinetic poetry that is as much a testament to his talent as to why Flash became such an important piece of authoring software.

Find a quiet, solitary space to lose yourself in this piece because to glance away for a moment can mean missing out on a gorgeous sequence in which signifiers dance.

Screen shot from “The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans. Orange background with black text. The letters “de” are placed in the middle of the screen with ends of a word around it. For example, on top of “de” there are the words “lite”, putting these words together would spell “delite”. Text (without including the letters d and e in front of them): “lite, ntist, lft, light, licious”.

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. 

“Star Wars, one letter at a time” by Brian Kim Stefans

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Screen shot from “Star Wars, one letter at a time” by Brian Kim Stefans. White background with a letter “m” in black.

Open “Star Wars, one letter at a time” by Brian Kim Stefans

This Lettriste treatment of the screenplay for Star Wars: A New Hope (the 1975 4th draft as found in this fan site) focuses our attention on the script one fingerstroke at a time. I don’t say “letter” (as the title suggests) because we hear every letter (tap), space (bump), end of line (ding), and desk-jarring carriage return (ka-chunk), making us very aware of the materiality of a typewriter.

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“Dreamaphage (Versions 1 and 2)” by Jason Nelson

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Open “Dreamaphage (Versions 1 and 2)” by Jason Nelson

This is a haunting work that blends fiction, medical reports, memories, and poetry into a rich multimedia experience that is both fascinating and unsettling. Jason Nelson uses a variety of interfaces (in two distinct versions, no less), pop up and notification windows, audio and video to draw readers into the minds of those infected by the fictional (?!) Dreamaphage virus. The medical reports frame and weave within each poetic narrative, some made poetic by virtue of dream imagery that gestures towards Surrealism, some by moments of intense lyricism.

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“Internet Text, 1994- [Through Feb 2, 2006]” by Alan Sondheim

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Screen capture of "Internet Text, 1994-[Through Feb 2, 2006]" by Alan Sondheim. A circular word cloud. Text: "WORLD / WRITING / TEXT / body / FORM / TIME / NET / space / LIFE / ITSELF/ COMMUNITY / thing / (etc)"

Open “Internet Text, 1994-[Through Feb 2, 2006]” by Alan Sondheim

Alan Sondheim is a prolific writer, musician, and artist who uses the Internet as an inspiration and means for publication. The sheer mass of text he has produced in the past 15+ years is so staggering that it reminds me of Basil Bunting’s “On the Flyleaf of Pound’s Cantos.” To be specific, here are some numbers compiled after cutting and pasting all the text in the files which constitute this portion of Sondheim’s Internet Text:

  • 15,880,841 bytes (almost 16 MB) of pure text.
  • 15,080,183 characters (counting spaces).
  • 2,468,088 words.
  • 7,881 pages of single-spaced 10.5 pt New Courier text with 1” margins.

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“Diagrams Series 6: 6.4 and 6.10” by Jim Rosenberg

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Open “Diagrams Series 6: 6.4 and 6.10” by Jim Rosenberg

For over 30 years, Jim Rosenberg has been exploring the poetic possibilities of language juxtaposition (to place side by side) and superposition (to place on top of something else) on the page and on screen. His diagram poems use visual algorithmic notation and overlayed text to break away from the singularity of thought promoted by traditional syntax and create multiplicity of thought in his readers. He is exploring the syntax of hypertext, which we might take for granted. For more details on his poetics and on the fascinating thought process behind it, I recommend this essay by Rosenberg.

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“Project for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]” by William Poundstone

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Open “Project for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]” by William Poundstone

This spellbinding work is like a textual film in which one word is presented at a time along with an icon as music plays along. But there’s more: there are subliminal words and images displayed in it. While you can’t look away, it does provide an exit to its interface, which that provides some fascinating context. Like the bottomless pit it describes, one feels like falling into it, trying to reach its bottom, only to eventually realize one is caught in an endless loop, falling deeper into a trance. Difficult to classify in terms of its genre, it feels like the illegitimate child of House of Leaves and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, raised by the Noigandres Group and employed by Don Draper.

Yes. It’s that hip.

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.

“Oulipoems” by Millie Niss with Martha Deed

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Screen caption of “Oulipoems” by Millie Niss with Martha Deed. Mustard background with a lot of different texts in blue, black, and red. On top of everything is the title of the poem "Oulipoems."

Open “Oulipoems” by Millie Niss with Martha Deed

This is a delightful collection of seven short Flash poems inspired by OULIPO constraints and US politics from around 2004, such as the Iraq war. The introduction to the poems offers abundant detail on the combinatorial mathematics and constraints used, so I will offer a brief comment on each piece:

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“Stud Poetry” by Marko Niemi

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“Stud Poetry” by Marko Niemi

This playful e-poem generation machine places randomly selected words and assigns random relative value to them as it places them in the structure of a poker game. You play “Five Card Stud” against five randomly chosen poets, who play at differently randomized levels of “aggressiveness.”

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“Lexia to Perplexia” by Talan Memmott

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Screen capture of "Lexia to Perplexia" by Talan Memmott. A black-and-white eye is displayed over two grid-like images. Text: "(incomplete)"

Open “Lexia to Perplexia” by Talan Memmott

This celebrated work of e-literature is not only hard to label— poetry, fiction, theory, essay, English, code— it is also hard to read. This is not a criticism of the text: it is merely an observation on its ontological reality.

When Memmott wrote it in 2000, DHTML was a new thing, without established standards, and a key player in the browser wars. Aware of the difficulties in maintaining compatibility over time, he engaged its obsolescence thematically in the work. Nowadays, DHTML has come a long way towards becoming a new open standard, but the code in “Lexia to Perplexia” barely functions in modern browsers.

What can an interested reader do to experience more than the tip of the iceberg that is still functional in this text?

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“Like Stars in a Clear Night Sky” by Sharif Ezzat

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Open “Like Stars in a Clear Night Sky” by Sharif Ezzat

This Flash hypertext poem is elegant in its simplicity. Its interface— a night sky with bluish stars that reveal narrative poems— allows its readers to explore the thematically interconnected stories as they choose. The narrative poems are minimally formatted— free verse center justified in the middle of the screen— focusing attention on stories of the challenges of life and love on the characters. The ambient sounds and introductory movie with a voice reading the opening poem in Arabic— the lines of which are associated with each star— set a dreamy, meditative tone for the poem.

Its power lies in its earnest, honest simplicity.

Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. 

Read more about this work at ELMCIP.