An American Life In Writing

An American Life In Writing is a re-contextualization of the words used in the first fifty-two poems of Ted Kooser's column, American Life In Poetry. Each poem is alphabetized and made mobile through the use of Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets. Users are invited to click words within a list, and then to drag them using a mouse in order to (re)organize, score, visually depict, and otherwise create a new work. The code employed in the project allows users to deal in more than one graphic plane by piling language on top of itself and by offering shifts in perspective through an uncommon juxtaposition of words. Side by side, these two curations of language present both the traditional editorial model of print and a newer model based within the decentralized context of networked culture.