Heart Pole

Description taken from N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: "David Knoebel's exquisitely choreographed 'Heart Pole,' from his collection 'Click Poetry,' features a circular globe of words, with two rings spinning at 90 degrees from one another, 'moment to moment' and 'mind absorbing.' A longer narrative sequence, imaged as a plane undulating in space, can be manipulated by clicking and dragging. The narrative, focalized through the memories of a third-person male persona, recalls the moment between waking and sleeping when the narrator's mother is singing him to sleep with a song composed of his day's activities. But like the slippery plane that shifts in and out of legibility as it twists and turns, this moment of intimacy is irrevocably lost to time, forming the 'heart pole' that registers both its evocation and the on-goingness that condemns even the most deeply seated experiences to loss" (11).