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1. 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

2. 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

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. On the Life of Man

   What happens when you change a poem’s medium and context? Is it still the same poem? Ingrid Ankerson’s re-production of Raleigh’s poem suggests that it is not.

   The first difference is that the “print” version of the poem is designed to direct the reader’s full attention to the written words on the page, with sounds emerging from reading the words, whether aloud or silently. That page is a kind of musical score, designed to produce a performance of musical language in the reader. Anderson’s version transforms the poem into a kind of film (even recreating some of the scratch and dust marks we see projected on movie screens), reformatting and scheduling its lines with pauses different from the kind evoked by the poem. The images of different species of prehistoric man, however, transform this poem the most by recontextualizing its message.

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:41

5. Anywhere

   This collaborative poem combines the Steve Matanle’s words and voice with Ingrid Ankerson’s music and design to produce a well integrated multimedia performance. The poem plays like a short film, requiring no interaction from the readers but commanding aural and visual attention with engaging music, a richly textured vocal performance, and visuals that enhance the experience of the poem. Some lines in the poem are punctuated by the appearance of text, brief animation sequences, and graphical information that enriches the imagery evoked in the spoken words. Timing is all in this brief poem which synchronizes its visuals with the music and rhythms of Matanle’s voice to tell a story of a forbidden love affair that is hurtling towards a destination as inevitable as the train tracks laid across the poem’s visual field.

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 14:46

6. ira, sarah

   This video poem is about how serious the undertones of a playful crush on celebrities can be. Each stanza that scrolls up the screen delivers a layer, perspective, or progression of the situation, starting with a Sunday afternoon routine for the couple whose desires shape the poem. A key strategy in the poem is to examine the focus of desire, within the couple, towards the radio celebrities, particularly their bodies, voices, and the idealized American Life they represent. Another is to deploy radio metaphors to reflect upon relationships, using images of tuning to stations, focusing on host and guest, and providing images of wavelengths, which suggest that while they are both tuned to the same station, they may be on different wavelengths. Or perhaps they are on the same frequency, that of ordinary life with routines and ruts, while desiring to be on another, represented by the radio stars they are attracted to. The implications for this relationship can be intuited by examining the language used to indicate proximity and distance— between each other, between them and their respective celebrities, and between their life and the one they dream of.

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 20:16

7. Sky

   This poem is built over the song “Don’t Know Why” by Norah Jones, and takes its time doing so, with opening dedications, a slow-paced delivery of the poetic lines, and even some playful credits at the end. The poem’s linguistic text focuses on words used to denote possibilities, missed opportunities, second chances to create a tone similar to the last few sections of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but using language more fitting of “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town.” The lyrics in Norah Jones’ song enhance the melancholy tone, as well as the images of dusk turning into night and a flower losing its petals. So savor this unhurried poem and lose yourself for contemplation of its details, if only for the space of a song.

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 20:24

8. White Room

   The minimalist design for this poem concentrates attention on the visual while it evokes all the senses with its language choices. There is only one input cue at the opening of the poem a white dot in the faint gray background that triggers the poem’s slowly scheduled display of language. The pace at which lines fade in and out creates a layered meditative experience and the words instruct readers to imagine a space, do things with their bodies, and become aware of how it leads to sensory experience. Pay attention to the rhythm established by the fading language and to the rhetorical and semantic pattern Knoebel creates with the poem so you can really appreciate how he breaks both patterns with a single powerfully sensuous word.

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

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 20:45

9. Rude Little Song

   This aural piece is a kind of Lettrist sound poem, because it uses verbal language in sub-morphemic units (with thanks to Melissa Lucas for the term). In other words, the poem is concerned with putting together snippets of vocalized language sounds that don’t carry semantic meaning, all performed a capella, recorded, edited, and spatially arranged by Jim Andrews. The visual composition is as non-referential as the sounds, activated by moving the pointer over the pulsating colored squares. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

   Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 21:25

10. In the Footsteps of the Father

    This hypertext poem gives a voice to Jesus as he questions the narrative path he is in and decides not to follow in it. The central metaphorical motif in this poem— to follow in someone’s footsteps (in this case in the father)— has particularly powerful resonance when applied to Jesus and Jehovah. For Jesus to follow in his father’s footsteps is to become a god through painful self-sacrifice, but in this poem, Jesus seeks to make his own path as a human being.

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

    Hannelen Leirvåg - 10.02.2013 - 21:28

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