epoetica

The field of electronic literature and its criticism do not represent a break from the traditions of literature and criticism. Rather, they represent an opportunity to delve more purposefully and deliberately into questions about representation. I chose to focus in the first week on Neruda, which I thought would simplify things. I deliberately chose to avoid some of the writers who are known proto-hypermedia poets, only to discover that poetry in general seems to be hypertextual… and that hypertext is not about choice, but about depth. To state it differently, I could say that hypertext does not exist, but poetry always has and will, as long as we communicate through representation.
Read more

The final assignment is relatively easy.  Answer the following questions:

What insights (both practical and theoretical) have you gained into the poem/poems that you have studied? What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about hypermedia?

Lets play with these both. As I find it so very hard to separate the two these days. The two being poetry and hypermedia, and days being time, or the artificial measurement of the earth spinning. They say the earth is slowing down, and days millions of years ago were half of what they are today. So perhaps early humans lived to be hundreds of years old, simply because everything was so much faster. But I digress. Yes, yes I do.

Back to the original point. When I think of poetry I think of interface and movement and sound. Words are always attached to navigation and color and image. So both questions (and in fact it appears all the questions posed here) are great friends, separated by long distances and speaking different languages. But again a digression.

Read more

I just wrote a thank note to Davin for orchestrating epoetica – I haven’t had many opportunities lately to have FUN with thinking, reading, writing but this really has been a pleasure! And I’m completely grateful to those who have taken the time and car to read and respond to posts. If I had any suggestions for future epoeticas, I’d ask: can we do this again?? and perhaps invite more and/or other people to contribute? And of course, it’s also clear that we need to engage with each other more – a strange side-effect of virtual communication is either abundant, easy e-conversations or, as the poetics listserv can sometimes illustrate, a series of individuals talking to themselves, airing their own theories. Epoetica has abundant possibilities for collaboration and conversation and we really have yet to make the most of this forum.

Read more

The final assignment is relatively easy.  Answer the following questions:

• What insights (both practical and theoretical) have you gained into the poem/poems that you have studied?
• What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about hypermedia?
• What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about your own work (creative and critical)?
• What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about your colleagues and their work?
• What about epoetica worked well?  What didn’t?  How would you improve this process?

ah } kiss Tecate tutto –otica

LadakDigital!payLoss

Route       y        If a review appears in Serbian

Makarasana       of

terremotosLhasa             : : Lakshmi

noqancheq

(Loss Pequeno Glazier, “Io Sono At Swoons”)

Interested in breaking down with traditional syntax and in abandoning punctuation and linear arrangement of words, in “A Throw of the Dice” Mallarme invites the reader to follow the poetic text in a nonconventional format, which, at first sight, reveals itself as being devised under the sign of chance or random because words are left free on the page, verbs and adverbs, nouns and articles are no longer bound to each other, capital letters follow no orthographic rules, punctuation marks are almost absent, and sentences can be barely read and identified. The feeling of incidental organization is caused by the very first visual impact of each page that Mallarme had skillfully manipulated in an attempt to escape “the four extremities of the page by jumping the boundary of the spine to tie two conventional pages into one,” as Dorothy M. Betz beautifully describes the poet’s intention and writing strategy. In Betz’s opinion, “the generally-falling movement of the text across each page depicts the fall of the dice; the ship on page three, the hat on page six, and the constellation on page eleven depict objects named at those points” whereas the arbitrary position of the words translates the poet’s playfulness and intent to mock the limits of the book and to express his frustration in writing.   Read more

I want to invite everyone here to enter a poem into my poetry cube. I designed it as a throw back to older 3-d forms, but with an easy to use database and entry form for those who hate coding.    cheers, Jason

I was planning to respond to the assignment for week 4, focusing on the ideas that I had been developing over the last several weeks.  I found postings by Lori and Zephyr, and my path, quite appropriately, forked away from what I had intended to write about to something new.

Reading Lori’s entry on Karpinski and Howe’s ,  which  ties previous discussions about three-dimensionality to the current one about chance, I was reminded of a work which I had forgotten about, but which I want to share: Brooke M. Campbell’s Choose Your Own Sexuality from .  Campbell’s piece combines poetry, biography, and history under the familiar form of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel to create a queer biography of Emily Dickinson.  Campbell’s piece takes seriously the implications of queer scholarship, shedding light on the general import of such work:  The author is often just as much what he or she is as what he or she isn’t and that creative works reflect this similar tension.  Decision-making is not simply the rational evaluation of two choices, rather they are heavily laden with cultural expectations, social frameworks, habits, law, and deep desires.  Though Campbell’s piece uses the familiar framework of binary choices, the fact that Campbell’s piece is based on actual historical events loads the choices up with the questions: “What happened?” and “What do we want to happen?”  The effect is not to simply fork the work, but to play in the imaginative spaces between the choices, to speculate about possibility.

Read more

the first video work i made, i made from footage of kelsey’s funeral set to a soundtrack of billy idol.

My mom comes and brings a vhs recorded with Kelsey’s memorial service. Why do we call it hers? Ours, about Kels (’over my dead body’). None of us have ever watched it. I take it to school, turn off the monitor and dub it to DVD. Then watch it one night in my basement studio, lights off, lying on the futon, blanket on.

i didn’t know – and couldn’t be bothered to learn – how to rip right from the DVD. so i filmed it again on my (cracked) computer screen, mini dv camera balanced on a beer bottle and a stack of books – as am, often, i. an aesthetic was born: lo-fi, rascuache and hand-made-for-youtube style.

Editing. The more I clip and playback the further the distance between the white-faced 23 year old with the hollow eyes and skeletal shadows and the me that’s like, ‘hey Chris can you do me a favor? Film me dancing around and singing to billy idol? It’s kinda weird but it’s to edit over the film from the funeral… you know, ‘hey little sister, what have you done?’

i’m into all the the youtube tropes – the music videos, the narcissistic (self-conscious) metubes, the i.movie edits, the bedroom girls – and i can claim my interest’s academic (it is – somewhat – so i do) but the context (which is a separate theatre from the i set to screen these works in) also works to disable any academic reading ().

Read more

You can, with your little hands, drag me into your grave -you have the right — I myself who am joined with you, I let myself go — but if you wish, the two of us, let us make… an alliance -a hymen, magnifcent – and the life left in me I will use to…- so not mother then?ceremony – coffin – etc.there we saw (the father) the whole material side – which lets us tell ourselves at need – ah! well yes! it is all there – no fear for me thinking of something else (the reformation of his spirit, which is eternal – can wait (granted but eternity through my life)_____father -shape his spirit (he absent, alas! as we would have shaped him better present but sometimes when it all seems to be going too well – as an ideal – cry out – in the mother’s tone, she who has become attentive – This is not enoughI want him, him – and not me - 

my first introduced me to on the , in april of 2004, more or less 5 weeks before the sang at .

Read more