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1. <? echo [THE_SIGNIFIER] ?>

   This suite of 20 short pieces, is focused on technologies and codes left behind in the ever accelerating change of computer systems. Thuan describes it as “a requiem without mourning, sorrowing or lamenting since they are always recycled and resurrected, by one way or another, in different signifiers.” And indeed, some of these pieces use codes and HTML functionality already passé and mostly forgotten in 2006, such as pop up windows, link mouseovers to reveal texts through improved color contrast, frames, tables, menu windows, and so on. This isn’t just nostalgia, however, because Thuan is able to shake us up with scans (real or simulated?) of our browser cache or computer’s hard drive to reveal porn, options that may or may not send information about ourselves or our computer system (our digital self) to sources we may not trust, and other procedures that remind us that just because we cannot see the code doesn’t mean it isn’t there, active and readable. He also reminds us of code with texts in a hybrid of natural and computer language reminiscent of Mez Breeze’s mezangelle.

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 02.02.2013 - 12:19

2. Simplicity

   Using frames, pop-up windows, animated GIFs, error codes, forms, and pop up menus, this suite of 10 short e-poems written between 1998-2000 by Vietnamese poet Duc Thuan are a snapshot of the pre-2000 Web and its concerns. The interface is minimalist, evoking the title, and the works themselves are simple to operate yet their content suggests an ironic relation to the title. From the opening, Thuan establishes an aesthetic of code and malfunctioning in “Crash,” an idea explored throughout the suite in poems like “The Hidden and the Shown,” “Interact,” and “Interact.” “Imaguage of Consciousness” accompanies images of Web advertising banners along with jarringly loud music to warn us of directions we should avoid. The final poem “Diary of a Drunkard I Only Met Once” uses the simple interface of nested menus to organize a poem in way that provide multliple reading possibilities and stanzas embedded within lines, something evocative of Jim Rosenberg’s work. These are deceptively simple works, worthy of focused attention to appreciate their complexities. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 02.02.2013 - 12:44

3. What They Speak When They Speak to Me

   Originally produced as an installation piece for large touchscreen monitors in 2007, this poem is now available as a free iOS App. The Speak app turns all the letters of the poems into a kind of letter cloud or constellation but with the letters hovering over their relative position. When you touch the screen and drag your fingertip across it, the poetic line is reconstituted from that point onwards, following the trail left by your finger’s movement, and fading back into the cloud when you lift your finger. This allows for readers to experience incomplete lines and incomplete words, depending on where you’ve touched in the sentence. Lewis engages this computational structure in his poem thematically, because it is about miscommunication across language, culture, and identity. The snippets of comprehension one gets when hearing speech in different languages are echoed in the poem’s structure.

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 08.02.2013 - 14:42

4. The Battery Life of Meaning: Speech to Text Poetry

   This suite of poems were created from speech to text software listening to different kinds of audio— movies, talk radio, television, and political speeches— and a poetic shaping of the output from that computer operation. This ingenious approach produces some fascinating poems which you might label as “Conceptual writing” or “Flarf poetry” (flip a coin). (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 08.02.2013 - 16:55

5. A Tree with Managers and Jittery Boats

   The (mostly) still video of a staircase over which the menu/submenu structure of the poem unfolds is a visual representation of the concept Jason Nelson is exploring with this poem. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 08.02.2013 - 17:01

6. 3 Proposals for Bottle Imps

   This suite of three exquisitely paced narrative poems tell stories labelled as allegories of “Genius,” “Ambition,” and “Envy” yet structured as instructions for the design of bottle imps. <—-(This would be the place where I would normally place a link to a resource, but it is unnecessary for this work because Poundstone has put together a meticulously researched and insightful FAQ page.) In this FAQ page, he makes a case for these automata as fitting metaphors for electronic literature, because they are life-like creatures that are animated by mechanisms to produce a looping behavior on a scheduled performance. Indeed, these poems enact the metaphor very well as looping Flash animations used to deliver a narrative through tactical portioning and formatting of a prose text into lines, stanzas, and other visual organizational structures and carefully scheduled delivery of each portion. The careful attention to line structure elevates the prosaic language to poetry, and its scheduled presentation to e-poetry. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 08.02.2013 - 19:33

7. Ann Coulter : Human Document

   This series of visual poems use an artistic writerly method developed by Tom Philips for his famous artist book, A Humument. Philips extracted a poetic narrative about a character named Toge— who showed up when the words “together” or “altogether” were present on a page of W. H. Mallock’s Victorian novel A Human Document. Poundstone uses this method to poetically and artistically deconstruct Ann Coulter’s writing, exposing some of the ideological content hidden in her inflammatory prose. The parallels between Mallock’s Victorian sensibilities and Coulter’s conservative insensibility are apparent when juxtaposed with this mash-up, suggesting that she is “a crazy self referential Victorian.” (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 08.02.2013 - 19:41

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

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