Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
This category will determine what works are suitable as a pedagogical resource for practicing the writing skill.
“Endless Reader” is a children’s mobile application created by Originator, which has developed other recognized apps such as “Endless Numbers” and “Endless Alphabet.” This application is the follow-up to “Endless Alphabet,” integrating sight words with an interactive digital environment with the purpose of allowing children to hear words broken down to their simplest phonetic segments.
This lesson plan– the first in the E-Lit for ESL series— takes advantage of J.R. Carpenter’s polyphonic approach to the city to introduce the characteristics of e-literature, to provide some reading strategies and to encourage the use of digital tools in writing. The text “Saint Urban Street Heat” and its multiple vignettes that can be explored become a resource for reviewing the use of adjectives and presenting hyphenated adjectives to students.
This resource has been designed for teenagers and adults with at least an intermediate proficiency level. Its activities include:
Access the Teaching “Entre Ville” lesson plan.
Open “Toucher” by Serge Bouchardon, Kevin Carpentier, and Stéphanie Spenlé
This suite of short interactive pieces take advantage of more interface devices than the average e-poem, as is the case with using the microphone to allow you to “blow” the words and snowflakes aside, or control the motion of the text with your eyes by using a webcam to “read” your face. These delicate pieces are games, toys, musical pieces, and poems that exemplify the reader’s symbolic presence in virtual spaces. The poem with the Lettriste fly exposes the violence of the mouse click which is carried out with the same finger one uses to pull a gun’s trigger. And after a while you’ll wish you had a more effective arsenal to take care of that increasingly elusive nuisance of a fly.
Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.
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:
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.