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1. Walking Together What Remains

   This found poem is built from language in roadside garbage (specifically “pieces that had been in people’s mouths”) found and selected by Chris Green during a 30 minute walk during the first day of Spring in the year 2000. The lines composed from this fascinating set of constraints are a snapshot of what litterbugs in central Kentucky were eating in their cars or as they walked by a road— a kind of poetic ethnography. Each line of this poem is superposed over an artistic photograph that shows a portion of the found object and contains a footnote for each describing the object in the photograph and poetic line. The interface is a horizontally scrolling slideshow on a brief timer (that pauses while you place the pointer over the footnote), evoking the sequential structure of a walk. One fascinating aspect of this poem is how the punctuation between lines creates relations between the lines that might otherwise be lost, given an interface that promotes individual attention to each “slide.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 13:17

2. Genius

   This delightfully cinematic poem from 2001 is very much of the now, or as Ezra Pound famously said of literature, “news that STAYS news.” The poem connects several trains of thought, aurally and through temporal juxtaposition, dealing with themes of war, changing generations, naps, routine, media, and all the noise that drowns us out. The verbal part of the poem is delivered crisply through the audio track along with a catchy beat, and the visual language emphasizes certain words and phrases layered over composite images and video. Layers and loudness are an important strategy, especially when the music’s volume rises to overwhelm the voice before subsiding to allow the speaker to utter a final line (and visual information) that helps pull the poem together. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 13:25

3. Diver

   In this kinetic poem, the lines rise before our eyes like bubbles from a diver exploring the depths of a reservoir. The words in each line are formatted using size and position to direct the readers’ attention towards nouns, verbs, and adjectives, while de-emphasizing articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. The arrangement of each poetic or phrasal line into multiple lines clustered and spaced like stanzas makes the commas at the end of each seem vestigial, when the spatial and chronological dimensions create such a paused pace for the poem. There is something eerie about this poem, involving a tall drowned pecan tree, a bass, and man— a fellow diver, perhaps? Dive into this poem a few times and see what literal and symbolic things you discover in its depths. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 13:30

4. Murmuring Insects

   This is a heart-wrenching poem that radically recontextualizes Rengetsu’s Tanka (short poems) by juxtaposing it with sounds and voices from the September 11, 2001 attacks. The poem’s title animation presents the letters in the title descending and coalescing into words that reflect on a suggested surface below, using a background of soft night colors, the moon, and night sounds. Three things subvert the serene initial scene: the night sky contains a jet’s vapor trails, and for a few seconds, a highly transparent image of the burning Twin Towers fades in and out right before the date 09.11.01 appears. This juxtaposition and superposition in time and space of images, sounds, and words is the main strategy for constructing a powerful mix of frames of reference, separated by gulfs of time, place, and human experience. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 13:39

5. After Persephone

   This delicately layered poem builds upon the Persephone myth (briefly told at the beginning of the poem) to reflect on the universal experience of losing a daughter to adulthood and marriage. The visual image in the poem seems to be from a Demeter-like perspective as she sees the faded memory of her little girl, with muted colors and seemingly underwater. The poem progresses by gently directing readers to move the pointers over certain parts of the image, which triggers brief sound and textual sequences that explore the speaker’s state of mind. We also get layers of other images fading in and out, of a grown young woman and a bare field, both of which allude to the myth. This is a powerfully archetypal poem, using the technology to evoke a moment that should resonate with parents of grown children everywhere. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 13:43

6. Winter City Sleeps

   This video poem is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “Tree at My Window” with its treatment of internal and external weather. The speaker of the poem is experiencing a metaphorical winter of the soul, exploring the idea poetically, visually, and musically (using “Hymn” by Moby). The scheduling of textual elements and their movement and duration onscreen focuses the reader’s attention on the idea expressed in each line, creating a sequence of ideas that change over time. This allows for turns, shifts, reversals, and re-imaginings, much like the layering of images used by Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” but in time rather than in space. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 13:48

7. The Garden of Proserpine

   This poem focuses on one stanza from Swinburne’s poem of the same name to explore its theme in more detail. Upon loading the e-poem, an image of a garden appears with the text of the 11th stanza (out of 12), but the image immediately becomes darker and muted in its colors, perhaps to reinforce the notion of how life fades. Proserpine, famous for being tricked by Hades into being his wife by eating pomegranate seeds, now plants seeds whose fruit brings death to all to consume it. Yet this is not necessarily a bad thing, as this stanza points out, since everything— even endless flowing rivers— needs that final rest. McCabe’s interface is very simple yet manages to direct our attention to each line of the poem by enlarging the lines whenever we place our mouse over them and returning them to their small original size and position when we move the pointer away. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:10

8. Representatives

   This poem is inspired by the phone conversations made by telemarketing representatives whose peak calling hours were in the early evening, when people are having dinner and perhaps unwinding with a glass of wine after a long day’s work. Written and published in 2001, this poem captures some of the frustration and unexpected human connections that occurred in these contexts before the National Do Not Call Registry was implemented in the U.S. in 2004, effectively ending that kind of telemarketing strategy. Clicking on each pictorial icon triggers a sequence of animated, scheduled text, with accompanying images and music, told from the perspective of each of the two women who seem to find unexpected pleasure in their weekly phone conversations. At least during this time in the history of telemarketing, the phone technology allowed for human interactions, sometimes cordial, sometimes providing opportunities for cathartic venting of pent up frustrations, and occasionally, very rarely, genuine connections and empathy. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:13

9. Meditation on a Bar Stool

   This video poem is a meditation on breath, life, and death inspired by Buddha’s teachings, which may or may not have expired. The poem uses simple animations suggestive of the swelling of a chest as one draws breath, the thinness that comes from letting it out, and the burning of a cigarette. Aptly paced for the meditative contemplation of words, and lines, the poem begins with a quote from Buddha, emphasizing some of its language through animation and scheduling, and then presenting a response from the speaker, who sits at a bar stool, savoring some of the guilty pleasures life has to offer. As you read (and reread) this concise lyric poem, think of what it’s doing with certain binary opposites: exhale/inhale, life/death, outside/inside, and via negativa / via positiva. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:19

10. Sinking

    This poem plays like a short video in which each line is fades in and out of the window, moving or remaining static, with or without the company of another line. The speaker is a young adult who is faced with a vivid image of the reality of being independent— a sink full of dirty dishes— which triggers a memory of learning to swim in Lake Michigan with her mother. Swimming becomes a metaphor for independent adult life in a poem which explores its parallels in revealing ways for both the speaker and her mother. The minimalist video background and music create an important sense of progression that sets the tone for a powerful final line in the poem that should send you right back to replaying the video poem to decide what happens at the end. Does she sink or swim?

    (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

    Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:22

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