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The newest issue of Slope includes a feature guest-edited by Edward Picot: "What's going on with hyperliterature?". My hyperpoem "river/running" is included in the feature along with the work of Mez, Jason Nelson, Lewis LaCook, Giselle Beiguelman, and Jorge Luiz Antonio (among others).
"river/running" is the first of several works in which I'm sort of extending a form I developed for print poems called the "conditional line." About 8 years ago, I wrote this really crude poem:
Choice, Mindful
I wake, tonight undone, the comfort of you
still on my lips or
there for the first time,
like a brief
note scraped in tombs
and tones of unkempt lives and loves and me.
I'll plunk this down;
I'm tired of this:
what I'm tired of.
Punctuation implicit in the cutting dreams
roving like flowers
on a prowl for drones.
my sty, my men stutter in a flutter,
in a flurry of frustration.
his pistol told of stories sold, of spent rhyme.
an unspent rhyme.
I'm tired of this --
and you say I say
me.
The poem itself is really bad--angst-ridden adolescent wordplay. Its only saving grace was its form, which I found exciting. I intended the poem to have multiple readings; at points where one line branches underneath another, I intended the reader to choose whether to complete the top line and then drop down to the line underneath or to simply drop down to the 'neath line and continue their reading. So, the poem's first three lines have conditional readings: "I wake, tonight undone, the comfort of you / still on my lips or / there for the first time" or "I wake, tonight / still on my lips or / there for the first time" or "I wake, tonight undone, the comfort of you / still / there for the first time" or "I wake, tonight / still / there for the first time".
I wrote in this form of the conditional line 3 years before I discovered the work of digital poets, and it has flavored my approach to hyperpoetics as a process of removal, of paring. The challenge I love is developing syntactic units that work with or without their conditional elements; right now, I'm working simultaneously on a book-length series of poems in the conditional line and several other digital works that, like "river/running," create new syntactic readings by the removal of linked text instead of the referral to linked text.
Posted by brandon barr at March 2, 2003 11:16 AM | TrackBack