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1. 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

2. 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

3. Death Valley

   This short poem uses a backdrop of stars flickering and occasionally shooting in the background as lines of text flow up the screen accompanied by images that emphasize some aspects of the text. This is not a romanticized cool night sky with distant stars: its imagery emphasizes the heat of blazing suns. The speaker isn’t a Romantic poet gazing longingly at the unreachable: she describes us as “dangerous” burning as hotly as the stars themselves, but with hellish desire.

   The desire to touch the stars is emphasized by the textual responsiveness as each line and stanza moves from the bottom to the top of the screen. Touch the lines with the pointer, and a hissing, loud, whisper of a voice reads the lines out loud, once for each contact, perhaps a reminder of how loud the burning of stars must sound, if sound could carry across such vast, empty, distances.

   If we shift our focus from the macroscopic scale of the universe to the microscopic scale of electrical impulses, are those untouchable pixels flickering on the screen equally distant?

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:33

4. Dissolution

   This responsive poem is structured into an 8 by 4 grid of thumbnail images. By placing the pointer over each square, the image is enlarged, presenting a line of poetry. Moving from square to square, the reader can create line combinations in multiple directions within this grid, creating new line combinations. The order in which one reads each combination can really change how one understands the text. As you read this e-poem, meditate on some of these relations between its beautifully juxtaposed elements: call and response, setup and surprise, subject and predicate, point and counterpoint, image and text, turn and volta.

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:38

5. Fallow Field

   This narrative hypertext work about the final season of an unfruitful marriage is divided into two parts, six sections, and 30 lexia to deliver the equivalent of a short story into a structure associated with poetry. The numbering of the lexias, as well as the primary interface offered to read them (depicted in the image above) which presents them sequentially numbered on a single scrolling column draws attention to each group of sentences, creating emphasis where needed. The language itself is pure prose poetry, with alliterations underscoring important moments in the poem, such as the title, taken from the emotionally and verbally resonant last sentence in the poem.

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:55

6. Inanimate Alice, Episode 3: Russia

   This is a work of fiction told in verse, cinematically, and with video games about the coming of age of a girl named Alice. This novel— self-consciously labelled as such to evoke the original meaning of the term: a new genre— reinvents the genre in digital media for a generation portrayed through Alice.

   Even though Alice’s circumstances are atypical (living around the world with her oil industry employed father and being home-schooled by her artist mother), she is emblematic of a generation whose experience of the world is deeply interconnected with digital media. Her developing literacy includes programming her animated creation and imaginary friend Brad on a portable device that allows her to take photographs and videos, play games, search information, and symbolically be a part of her, containing some of her memory and identity. This device is the 21st century version of the journal or diary, in which an Alice from previous centuries would have developed her voice and identity through writing, drawing, painting, scrapbooking, and other multimodal forms of writing compatible with paper-based technologies. Curiouser and curiouser.

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 15:03

7. Letters Demand Things

   This suite of two responsive visual poems are inspired by typography and phonetics, and the poetics of Concretism and Lettrism. “Vowel Submission” seeks to discover letters physically discoverable by breaking off portions of vowels. The interface leads readers to probe the space of the poem searching for triggers that will break the rotating vowels into the consonants that lie within. “Typespeak” is the more interesting piece because it vocalizes the sounds of each letter without combining them into words. In other words, one can type a word, but it will play as a simultaneous set of individual sounds. He turns the computer’s keyboard into an instrument that plays verbal notes from Madsen’s vocal apparatus. The random placement of brief letter animations on the screen also resists any attempts at writing words, a very Lettrist move because it subverts attempts at creating meaning.

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 15:34

8. Nine: Puzzling through Several Lives

   This poem is mapped onto a nine tile sliding puzzle, the kind that traditionally has a single image that one can scramble or unscramble. The interface for this is the same, but Lewis throws a curve ball in this piece: every time the reader moves a tile— perhaps with the hope of completing the image— the image changes. One set of images is a photograph of Lewis himself, and another is a kind of map, suggesting that if we could complete it, we’d see him or where he’s from. But identity isn’t that simple to put together, particularly in the case of someone with such a diverse ethnic background as Lewis. Keep this idea in mind as you read the text as you attempt to complete the puzzle— will you get closure from this piece by completing the puzzle or is this denied much like easy answers about identity are to Lewis? (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 15:50

9. Conversation

   This suite of three sound poems (or three-part poem) were inspired by Glenn Gould and his experiments with musique concrète. Nelson uses audio recordings of interviews on three topics— injuries, products, and robots— and places them on an interface that allows you to mix 8 clips at different volume levels and audio panning (sending signal to the left or right speakers). This can be used to listen to a single voice or place multiple voices in conversation, adjusting their virtual proximity (volume) and relative position in order to construct a sense of space in which people discuss a topic. Each interface is visually and thematically designed with a different background images, slider knobs, and an animated morphed image. The image above is from “Injury Analysis” and the following two are from “Product Sermon” and “Robot Party.”

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 20:05

10. Sotto Voce

    "I know the voices dying with a dying fall
    Beneath the music from a farther room."

    The quote from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an important motif in this poem by Safavian, inspired by overheard cell phone conversations. These conversations are intimately private yet their delivery in public spaces make them “become part of the poetry of public, everyday life,” according to Safavian. This idea of private confessions getting out into the world is a theme parallelled in Prufrock, which in turn references Guido da Montefeltro’s words in Dante’s Inferno (see the epigraph).

    Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 20:32

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