I had a lot of fun poking around, looking for science fiction poetry journals. Most of the stuff I've written this semester leans more toward the speculative genre, even though it's not outright science fiction. Speculative fiction (and poetry) encompasses all kinds of imaginative niches of writing, from SF to high fantasy to urban fantasy and many more.
Source 1: Strange Horizons
I think I'm going to submit my poetry to this journal. Strange Horizons publishes speculative fiction, poetry, reviews, and artwork, along with regular columns. I really enjoyed some of the poetry I read on this site, particularly Some Random Hero by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff. The play on traditional fairy tale elements really appeals to me; I played with this in one of my poems this semester.
Source 2: The Mythic Delerium
One thing that really fascinates me about this online journal is that each featured poem is accompanied by an audio file of the author reading her or his poem. There's something incredibly evocative about hearing the words as the author intended them to be read instead of just reading words on a page. The Mythic Delerium is a print journal, and you can subscribe on the website.
Source 3: The Pedestal Magazine
This is my second choice for submission. The poetry on this site isn't as specifically speculative as it is in Strange Horizons, but the works published here are beautiful, and many of them possess a dreamlike quality that ties them together.
Source 4: Electric Velocipede
This site is a science fiction 'zine that accepts prose fiction as well as poetry. The submission requirements are rather stringent, but the quality of the work published is excellent.
Source 5: Aberrant Dreams
This is a really cool 'zine built with Flash. If you have a slow internet connection or an older browser/computer, it's probably not the easiest thing to navigate, but the animations are fun. The animations actually remind me of the X-Files crossed with Scooby Doo. The poetry and fiction archived here has a definite spec fic bend.
Source 6: Locus Online
This is the online version of Locus Magazine, one of the best-known speculative fiction publications. The online version includes features such as reviews and articles as well as an exhaustive list of other spec fic websites and journals. This is where I went to find the other sources listed in this post.
30 June 2008
27 June 2008
Week 4
I'm so sorry, but this is going to be a short post again. My grandmother's in the emergency room, and I've got to get back up there as soon as I can. This just hasn't been my family's month for health, has it?
Source 1: Winning Writers
I have to admit, I'm always wary of sites where you have to pay to get resources. Some are definitely valid, but there are so many sketchy sites on the web that it's probably a good thing to be paranoid. This site, by virtue of being included on Dr. Reid's list as well as it's appearance, looks to be valid, which makes it an interesting resource.
I've got to admit that I'm a bit miffed at having to sign up for a newsletter before I can access the lists of contests. I get enough junk email at the moment, so I'm going to skip that and bookmark the site for later. I do like the collection of poetry resources, though, particularly the list of exotic forms. I tend to write freeverse, but I love learning about new poetic forms and experimenting with them. The Guide to Verse Forms is particularly useful, with a huge list of forms.
The list of links to legal resources for writers is also handy. I've got to admit that I haven't the first clue about copyrighting my own material, so I'll definitely bookmark this page.
Source 2: The Iowa Review
I really like the simple layout of this site. It seems to be the online edition of a print journal, much like what we at TAMU-C have done with The Mayo Review, and only some of the works are included on the site. As I said, I like the simple layout because in a format like this, the simplicity allows the reader to focus on the words themselves instead of being distracted by flashing graphics or (god forbid) annoying music.
I noticed on the writer's guidelines page that this journal does not accept email submissions. This seems really strange to me, probably because we encourage email submissions to the Mayo Review. The vast majority of people spend time on the internet every day, and it's much more convenient to put together a journal if you've got everything already in computer-ready formats. It seems to me that blocking email submissions would discourage many writers who are short on time and would find email submissions easier to work with.
Source 3: Net Verse
What a nifty collection of articles! the first one I read is from 1997 and talks briefly about everything from British online poetry to science fiction poetry (you can see why this caught my eye) to really, really BAD poetry by William McGonagall. I've heard of McGonagall before (in reference to Harry Potter; wonder if JKR named the transfiguration professor after this guy?), but I hadn't had the joy of reading quotes from his work. Wow.
There is also a fascinating article about the emergence of hypertext poetry from 1996/1997. I do wish that this writer had kept going with these articles, or would come back to the subject now. I think that an examination of e-poetry over the last decade would be a fascinating read, especially if it traced the evolution of the form from early, link-clicking poems to newer forms using Flash animations and so on.
Source 1: Winning Writers
I have to admit, I'm always wary of sites where you have to pay to get resources. Some are definitely valid, but there are so many sketchy sites on the web that it's probably a good thing to be paranoid. This site, by virtue of being included on Dr. Reid's list as well as it's appearance, looks to be valid, which makes it an interesting resource.
I've got to admit that I'm a bit miffed at having to sign up for a newsletter before I can access the lists of contests. I get enough junk email at the moment, so I'm going to skip that and bookmark the site for later. I do like the collection of poetry resources, though, particularly the list of exotic forms. I tend to write freeverse, but I love learning about new poetic forms and experimenting with them. The Guide to Verse Forms is particularly useful, with a huge list of forms.
The list of links to legal resources for writers is also handy. I've got to admit that I haven't the first clue about copyrighting my own material, so I'll definitely bookmark this page.
Source 2: The Iowa Review
I really like the simple layout of this site. It seems to be the online edition of a print journal, much like what we at TAMU-C have done with The Mayo Review, and only some of the works are included on the site. As I said, I like the simple layout because in a format like this, the simplicity allows the reader to focus on the words themselves instead of being distracted by flashing graphics or (god forbid) annoying music.
I noticed on the writer's guidelines page that this journal does not accept email submissions. This seems really strange to me, probably because we encourage email submissions to the Mayo Review. The vast majority of people spend time on the internet every day, and it's much more convenient to put together a journal if you've got everything already in computer-ready formats. It seems to me that blocking email submissions would discourage many writers who are short on time and would find email submissions easier to work with.
Source 3: Net Verse
What a nifty collection of articles! the first one I read is from 1997 and talks briefly about everything from British online poetry to science fiction poetry (you can see why this caught my eye) to really, really BAD poetry by William McGonagall. I've heard of McGonagall before (in reference to Harry Potter; wonder if JKR named the transfiguration professor after this guy?), but I hadn't had the joy of reading quotes from his work. Wow.
There is also a fascinating article about the emergence of hypertext poetry from 1996/1997. I do wish that this writer had kept going with these articles, or would come back to the subject now. I think that an examination of e-poetry over the last decade would be a fascinating read, especially if it traced the evolution of the form from early, link-clicking poems to newer forms using Flash animations and so on.
20 June 2008
Week 3
(Sorry about the wonky formatting last week! I have absolutely no idea why that happened.)
Source 1: Poets.org
Wow, what a wonderfully designed site. I love the simplicity and class of the layout, and I LOVE that it's easy to navigate. I hate coming across a site that might be beautiful and creatively designed, but the navigation system is obscure and confusing. This site is very user-friendly.
The section of essays on poetry contains some really fascinating stuff. I spent ages poking around in the section on poetry and film. I'm a movie buff, but there are a lot of films in that section that I haven't heard of, much less seen. There are also essays on poetry and art, poetry and music, different schools and movements of poetry... so many resources! I also like that there is a section for people just starting out reading and writing poetry.
The ability to search for poets and poems is very helpful. I've read poetry for various classes, but I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with too many poets. I like that I can browse around this site and familiarize myself with poets I might not have found otherwise.
One thing I'm amazed by is the mobile capability of the site. So many people are using the web from their mobile phones these days, and it's so cool to be able to search for poetry on the go. Unfortunately it looks like the mobile site is optimized for iPhones; I haven't tested it out on my crappy old Samsung yet, but I assume it'll work just fine. Now I can do more than check my email and Twitter and look up movie times!
The links section (online poetry resources) is exhaustive and incredibly helpful. Poets.org has plenty of resources itself, but to add links to all of this? Wow.
Source 2: Interview with Louise Erdrich
One thing that stuck out at me is Erdrich's observation that English is very gender-based. It's interesting, because I never really thought of English that way. When attempting to learn French, I was constantly frustrated by the need to remember the gender of nouns; the book is masculine while the poem is feminine. Gendered nouns are counterintuitive to me because we do not do that in English. It's fascinating to think, though, that English does rely on the gender of the speaker and of the object of speech. Ojibwemowin does not use gender in speech, but in English, we will always say, "I told her about the book."
I'm having trouble figuring out Erdrich's position on writing about characters that are not of the writer's ethnicity. On one hand, as she says, if we didn't write about people who are very different from us, we'd probably have to stop writing entirely. I'd get incredibly bored writing stories about white, female, twenty-something grad students, heh. But on the other hand, I can see how it would be very difficult for someone to write a believable, in-depth story about someone with a very different lifestyle or ethnicity. I guess that's why I believe in research. I think people should write whatever they're called to write, but that they if they choose to write about a character of different ethnicity, they should attempt to do so with as much sensitivity and thoroughness of research as possible.
Source 3: Electronic Poetry Center
I think this might be the best resource for e-poetry that I've looked at so far. I like the simple layout of the e-poetry section, an a to z listing of poets who have published their work online along with various sites dealing with e-poetry.
I've noticed a trend in that many of the webzines devoted to publishing e-poetry haven't updated in a few years. I wonder if this is just because many of the sites we're looking at share the same link pool, or if there's actually been a cooling off in publishing e-poems.
I love the list of blogs that deal with e-poetry. I enjoy bouncing around the web, reading blogs that catch my eye, and EPC has a big list of blogs to check out. The site also contains a large list of authors, linking to biographies on EPC's site. The authors also have linked CVs as well as links to examples of their work.
Source 1: Poets.org
Wow, what a wonderfully designed site. I love the simplicity and class of the layout, and I LOVE that it's easy to navigate. I hate coming across a site that might be beautiful and creatively designed, but the navigation system is obscure and confusing. This site is very user-friendly.
The section of essays on poetry contains some really fascinating stuff. I spent ages poking around in the section on poetry and film. I'm a movie buff, but there are a lot of films in that section that I haven't heard of, much less seen. There are also essays on poetry and art, poetry and music, different schools and movements of poetry... so many resources! I also like that there is a section for people just starting out reading and writing poetry.
The ability to search for poets and poems is very helpful. I've read poetry for various classes, but I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with too many poets. I like that I can browse around this site and familiarize myself with poets I might not have found otherwise.
One thing I'm amazed by is the mobile capability of the site. So many people are using the web from their mobile phones these days, and it's so cool to be able to search for poetry on the go. Unfortunately it looks like the mobile site is optimized for iPhones; I haven't tested it out on my crappy old Samsung yet, but I assume it'll work just fine. Now I can do more than check my email and Twitter and look up movie times!
The links section (online poetry resources) is exhaustive and incredibly helpful. Poets.org has plenty of resources itself, but to add links to all of this? Wow.
Source 2: Interview with Louise Erdrich
One thing that stuck out at me is Erdrich's observation that English is very gender-based. It's interesting, because I never really thought of English that way. When attempting to learn French, I was constantly frustrated by the need to remember the gender of nouns; the book is masculine while the poem is feminine. Gendered nouns are counterintuitive to me because we do not do that in English. It's fascinating to think, though, that English does rely on the gender of the speaker and of the object of speech. Ojibwemowin does not use gender in speech, but in English, we will always say, "I told her about the book."
I'm having trouble figuring out Erdrich's position on writing about characters that are not of the writer's ethnicity. On one hand, as she says, if we didn't write about people who are very different from us, we'd probably have to stop writing entirely. I'd get incredibly bored writing stories about white, female, twenty-something grad students, heh. But on the other hand, I can see how it would be very difficult for someone to write a believable, in-depth story about someone with a very different lifestyle or ethnicity. I guess that's why I believe in research. I think people should write whatever they're called to write, but that they if they choose to write about a character of different ethnicity, they should attempt to do so with as much sensitivity and thoroughness of research as possible.
Source 3: Electronic Poetry Center
I think this might be the best resource for e-poetry that I've looked at so far. I like the simple layout of the e-poetry section, an a to z listing of poets who have published their work online along with various sites dealing with e-poetry.
I've noticed a trend in that many of the webzines devoted to publishing e-poetry haven't updated in a few years. I wonder if this is just because many of the sites we're looking at share the same link pool, or if there's actually been a cooling off in publishing e-poems.
I love the list of blogs that deal with e-poetry. I enjoy bouncing around the web, reading blogs that catch my eye, and EPC has a big list of blogs to check out. The site also contains a large list of authors, linking to biographies on EPC's site. The authors also have linked CVs as well as links to examples of their work.
13 June 2008
Week 2
I apologize for the relative shortness of this post! My dad had surgery today, and I haven't had a lot of time for blogging, d'oh!
Source 1: Poetry Markets
Ooh, this is very useful! One of the most difficult and intimidating things, for me anyway, about writing poetry is trying to market it. I'm torn between two feelings: one is that I have no idea where to send my stuff, therefore there must not be anywhere to send it, and two is that there are entirely too many places to send it, so where on earth do I start?!
I have to admit, I wish that there were other ways to sort the markets than just paid/unpaid. Listing markets by genre would be incredibly helpful and would make it easier to find just the write publication for that strange bunch of space travel poems or whatever. However, having such a huge selection of markets makes for a bit of an adventure. I brought up all publications for the purpose of this entry, and chose three markets at random, just to check things out.
I like that the Poetry Markets site has information blurbs for each of the markets, even though some are short on solid info. It's nice to have direct links both to the market and the writers guidelines as well as a brief description of the market. Unfortunately, some of the links on the site are out of date; in order to still be useful to poets searching the web, the creator of Poetry Markets really should run through the links and remove or update anything that's out of date. But this is a very useful resource for anyone looking to get published.
Source 2: Deena Larsen's "A Quick Buzz"
I particularly like this part of Larsen's definition of e-poetry: "Defining electronic poetry (or e-poetry) is tricky. It's a moving target, changing at the same exponential rate that computers themselves change." That's a beautiful way to describe this emerging genre. Technology is changing at such an incredible rate; I don't have time to keep up with the new changes, but I am constantly amazed at the new things we can do with computers. I think it would be fascinating to do a survey of e-poetry from the advent of the genre on the internet to today, to see how the genre adapts to new trends on the internet, from early HTML to images to animations to Flash to CSS. I wonder where it will go next?
I found Robert Kendall's "A Study in Shades" to be a really great example of a symbiociative (great word!) image poem. I love how the small images at the top of the poem ("him" and "her") slowly changes with each new page of poetry. The images complement the words of the poem; they both illustrate the words and evoke the feeling of fading, of shifting from one mode of existence to another.
I'm particularly interested in the idea of hiding poems within games, as in Jennifer Ley's "War Games" as well as the other visual poems on The Bee Hive. I know nothing about animating in Flash, but I think that creating poems that are completely interactive is a pretty cool idea. The round robin interactive poetry on the Electronic Literature Organization site is a familiar idea to me, at least in the form of fiction. I've never really participated in round robin fiction in online communities, much less poetry, but the end results are interesting to me.
Source 3: Riding the Meridian
The site itself reminds me very much of the Matrix films, aesthetically. The use of binary code in the header graphic as well as the choice of colors is very evocative of the dystopian cyberpunk world created in the Matrix. It looks like this site hasn't been updated in several years, unfortunately. Some of the e-poems on the site seem primitive in terms of today's graphics, but as I said, the site hasn't been updated in years.
Diane Caney's "Unhelmeted" is particularly evocative. I love the images that accompany Caney's poem, and the way that she lays the words out on the page gives the white space a lot of power. I love poets who aren't afraid of white space (or black space, as is the case for several of the pages in this poem). I don't think it's necessary to fill up the whole page or stick to a strictly prescribed format for poems (i.e. everything lined up neatly along the left margin).
I was disappointed to find that Riding the Meridian is closed to new submissions and has been for the past five years. I would love to see new works in this genre. I'm hoping I'll find an active, up-to-date e-poetry site soon.
Source 1: Poetry Markets
Ooh, this is very useful! One of the most difficult and intimidating things, for me anyway, about writing poetry is trying to market it. I'm torn between two feelings: one is that I have no idea where to send my stuff, therefore there must not be anywhere to send it, and two is that there are entirely too many places to send it, so where on earth do I start?!
I have to admit, I wish that there were other ways to sort the markets than just paid/unpaid. Listing markets by genre would be incredibly helpful and would make it easier to find just the write publication for that strange bunch of space travel poems or whatever. However, having such a huge selection of markets makes for a bit of an adventure. I brought up all publications for the purpose of this entry, and chose three markets at random, just to check things out.
I like that the Poetry Markets site has information blurbs for each of the markets, even though some are short on solid info. It's nice to have direct links both to the market and the writers guidelines as well as a brief description of the market. Unfortunately, some of the links on the site are out of date; in order to still be useful to poets searching the web, the creator of Poetry Markets really should run through the links and remove or update anything that's out of date. But this is a very useful resource for anyone looking to get published.
Source 2: Deena Larsen's "A Quick Buzz"
I particularly like this part of Larsen's definition of e-poetry: "Defining electronic poetry (or e-poetry) is tricky. It's a moving target, changing at the same exponential rate that computers themselves change." That's a beautiful way to describe this emerging genre. Technology is changing at such an incredible rate; I don't have time to keep up with the new changes, but I am constantly amazed at the new things we can do with computers. I think it would be fascinating to do a survey of e-poetry from the advent of the genre on the internet to today, to see how the genre adapts to new trends on the internet, from early HTML to images to animations to Flash to CSS. I wonder where it will go next?
I found Robert Kendall's "A Study in Shades" to be a really great example of a symbiociative (great word!) image poem. I love how the small images at the top of the poem ("him" and "her") slowly changes with each new page of poetry. The images complement the words of the poem; they both illustrate the words and evoke the feeling of fading, of shifting from one mode of existence to another.
I'm particularly interested in the idea of hiding poems within games, as in Jennifer Ley's "War Games" as well as the other visual poems on The Bee Hive. I know nothing about animating in Flash, but I think that creating poems that are completely interactive is a pretty cool idea. The round robin interactive poetry on the Electronic Literature Organization site is a familiar idea to me, at least in the form of fiction. I've never really participated in round robin fiction in online communities, much less poetry, but the end results are interesting to me.
Source 3: Riding the Meridian
The site itself reminds me very much of the Matrix films, aesthetically. The use of binary code in the header graphic as well as the choice of colors is very evocative of the dystopian cyberpunk world created in the Matrix. It looks like this site hasn't been updated in several years, unfortunately. Some of the e-poems on the site seem primitive in terms of today's graphics, but as I said, the site hasn't been updated in years.
Diane Caney's "Unhelmeted" is particularly evocative. I love the images that accompany Caney's poem, and the way that she lays the words out on the page gives the white space a lot of power. I love poets who aren't afraid of white space (or black space, as is the case for several of the pages in this poem). I don't think it's necessary to fill up the whole page or stick to a strictly prescribed format for poems (i.e. everything lined up neatly along the left margin).
I was disappointed to find that Riding the Meridian is closed to new submissions and has been for the past five years. I would love to see new works in this genre. I'm hoping I'll find an active, up-to-date e-poetry site soon.
06 June 2008
Week 1
Source one: Toolkit for Poets
I'm a sucker for this kind of site. I love resource lists because you can find so many hidden gems that you might not have stumbled across otherwise. I quite like compiling my own resource lists, which reminds me... I really should rebuild my worldbuilding resources for fantasy/SF writers.
This site is a really great resource for any poet, from weathered masters to green newbies. The introductions to poetic terms/forms as well as the overwhelming number of links to other poetry sites provide a great springboard for anyone looking to expand their poetic horizons. There is also a very useful section on publishing and copyright; it focuses mainly on copyright in the US (with a single link to an Australian site), which works for this class, but could be expanded to include other countries.
Perhaps the most useful sections of this site are the links to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and quotations. It's inevitable that I won't be able to figure out the right word to use, and having more than dictionary.com or thesaurus.com will be incredibly helpful. I also love that the site lists a Middle English dictionary. It might be interesting to dig through there, find an obsolete word, and see if I can write a poem around it. The quotation links can come in handy, too, even for one of our poetry practices. Take a familiar quotation from one of those sites and fiddle with it a bit, then build a poem around it.
The information on different poetry forms is really interesting and useful. I'm really interested in playing with new, less common poetic forms. I found the page about the Korean form, sijo, to be really interesting, as I've never heard of that form before. I was ready to complain that the webmaster hadn't included any Korean sijo as examples, but I found the translations page, and I really appreciate that. I also liked the page on Japanese poetic forms. I'm familiar with haiku and get a kick out of writing them, but I hadn't heard of tanka or renga. I do wish there had been more information on Chinese poetic forms; I'm interested in seeing if Chinese poetry seems to focus on nature as deeply as Japanese and Korean poetry seems to.
Source two: Word Circuits
I've been writing on the internet for over ten years now, and I have no idea why it never occurred to me that HTML, CSS, Flash, images, etc, can be used for poetry. When writing fiction on the web, I used images on occasion to illustrate sections, but the idea of "writing" a poem using images is really new (and provocative) to me.
The excerpt from Bill Bly's We Descend reminds me of a strange, poetic version of those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories from my childhood. Using HTML links to move the prose-poem forward, and the footnotes give the reader somewhat unreliable look into the scholar's mindset and emotions.
Jackie Craven's "In The Changing Room" reminds me even more strongly of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. The poem is made up of 8 different characters' perceptions of an event. The path through the poem is in no way linear, and every time you read through the poem, the story will be a little different. Of course, you could read straight through each character's story, but the fun and intrigue in this poem is to click on the intertwining links within the narrative and jump back and forth between the characters' points of view.
I think my favorite poem in the gallery is Peter Howard's Flash presentation, "Subatomic and Particle Poetry." The comparison of poems and subatomic particles is strangely fascinating. I've been reading a book on cosmology, astrophysics, and the future of the universe, so maybe I was predisposed to liking this poem, but Howard's observations about the behavior of poetry in cyberspace and comparison to particle behavior is at the same time funny and insightful.
This wasn't the focus of this site, but this has inspired me to see if I can find any cyberpunk poetry. I'm a big fan of that genre of fiction, but I haven't found any poetry yet. Maybe I'll even write some.
Source three: ALTX Online Network
And my wish for cyberpunk poetry is fulfilled. I am so incredibly pleased to find the alt x e books section, with PDF and Print-on-Demand versions of the ALTX anthologies. I spent quite a while perusing the Hard_Code anthology edited by Eugene Thacker. Now, I'm not a coder or a programmer or anything like that. I can make websites and write HTML and CSS, both of which are more design-oriented than anything, and I can muddle my way through a bit of the web programming language PHP with a set of really good instructions. I could probably learn the coding stuff if I really applied myself, but it's not like I exactly have time for that sort of thing. But I do find the idea of merging fiction and poetry with code to be intriguing. MEZ's "_Datableeding" incorporates text as if the narrator is creating a program for reading. The reader must shuffle through bits of code interspersed in the code, notes, and so on. It's really a fascinating format. I also like the incorporation of common cyberpunk themes such as the concept of body with stories like Rebekah Sheldon's "Visible Body Project."
I'm a fan of comic books, and I love visual narrative. I like that ALTX has galleries of net art and "visible narrative" in the hyper x section of the website. The use of images that are seemingly unconnected to the words in some of these works makes for an interesting effect; it's not so much about telling a story with the image as you would in a comic book as it is about evoking an emotion that complements the words. I thought this was particularly effective in "dollspace...hauntologies," a collaboration between Francesca da Rimini, Ricardo Dominguez, and Michael Grimm included in "Alt-X-Hibition Visible Narratives."
Listening to: Robert Downey, Jr. - "Kimberly Glide"
Reading: The Hob's Bargain by Patricia Briggs
I'm a sucker for this kind of site. I love resource lists because you can find so many hidden gems that you might not have stumbled across otherwise. I quite like compiling my own resource lists, which reminds me... I really should rebuild my worldbuilding resources for fantasy/SF writers.
This site is a really great resource for any poet, from weathered masters to green newbies. The introductions to poetic terms/forms as well as the overwhelming number of links to other poetry sites provide a great springboard for anyone looking to expand their poetic horizons. There is also a very useful section on publishing and copyright; it focuses mainly on copyright in the US (with a single link to an Australian site), which works for this class, but could be expanded to include other countries.
Perhaps the most useful sections of this site are the links to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and quotations. It's inevitable that I won't be able to figure out the right word to use, and having more than dictionary.com or thesaurus.com will be incredibly helpful. I also love that the site lists a Middle English dictionary. It might be interesting to dig through there, find an obsolete word, and see if I can write a poem around it. The quotation links can come in handy, too, even for one of our poetry practices. Take a familiar quotation from one of those sites and fiddle with it a bit, then build a poem around it.
The information on different poetry forms is really interesting and useful. I'm really interested in playing with new, less common poetic forms. I found the page about the Korean form, sijo, to be really interesting, as I've never heard of that form before. I was ready to complain that the webmaster hadn't included any Korean sijo as examples, but I found the translations page, and I really appreciate that. I also liked the page on Japanese poetic forms. I'm familiar with haiku and get a kick out of writing them, but I hadn't heard of tanka or renga. I do wish there had been more information on Chinese poetic forms; I'm interested in seeing if Chinese poetry seems to focus on nature as deeply as Japanese and Korean poetry seems to.
Source two: Word Circuits
I've been writing on the internet for over ten years now, and I have no idea why it never occurred to me that HTML, CSS, Flash, images, etc, can be used for poetry. When writing fiction on the web, I used images on occasion to illustrate sections, but the idea of "writing" a poem using images is really new (and provocative) to me.
The excerpt from Bill Bly's We Descend reminds me of a strange, poetic version of those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories from my childhood. Using HTML links to move the prose-poem forward, and the footnotes give the reader somewhat unreliable look into the scholar's mindset and emotions.
Jackie Craven's "In The Changing Room" reminds me even more strongly of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. The poem is made up of 8 different characters' perceptions of an event. The path through the poem is in no way linear, and every time you read through the poem, the story will be a little different. Of course, you could read straight through each character's story, but the fun and intrigue in this poem is to click on the intertwining links within the narrative and jump back and forth between the characters' points of view.
I think my favorite poem in the gallery is Peter Howard's Flash presentation, "Subatomic and Particle Poetry." The comparison of poems and subatomic particles is strangely fascinating. I've been reading a book on cosmology, astrophysics, and the future of the universe, so maybe I was predisposed to liking this poem, but Howard's observations about the behavior of poetry in cyberspace and comparison to particle behavior is at the same time funny and insightful.
This wasn't the focus of this site, but this has inspired me to see if I can find any cyberpunk poetry. I'm a big fan of that genre of fiction, but I haven't found any poetry yet. Maybe I'll even write some.
Source three: ALTX Online Network
And my wish for cyberpunk poetry is fulfilled. I am so incredibly pleased to find the alt x e books section, with PDF and Print-on-Demand versions of the ALTX anthologies. I spent quite a while perusing the Hard_Code anthology edited by Eugene Thacker. Now, I'm not a coder or a programmer or anything like that. I can make websites and write HTML and CSS, both of which are more design-oriented than anything, and I can muddle my way through a bit of the web programming language PHP with a set of really good instructions. I could probably learn the coding stuff if I really applied myself, but it's not like I exactly have time for that sort of thing. But I do find the idea of merging fiction and poetry with code to be intriguing. MEZ's "_Datableeding" incorporates text as if the narrator is creating a program for reading. The reader must shuffle through bits of code interspersed in the code, notes, and so on. It's really a fascinating format. I also like the incorporation of common cyberpunk themes such as the concept of body with stories like Rebekah Sheldon's "Visible Body Project."
I'm a fan of comic books, and I love visual narrative. I like that ALTX has galleries of net art and "visible narrative" in the hyper x section of the website. The use of images that are seemingly unconnected to the words in some of these works makes for an interesting effect; it's not so much about telling a story with the image as you would in a comic book as it is about evoking an emotion that complements the words. I thought this was particularly effective in "dollspace...hauntologies," a collaboration between Francesca da Rimini, Ricardo Dominguez, and Michael Grimm included in "Alt-X-Hibition Visible Narratives."
Listening to: Robert Downey, Jr. - "Kimberly Glide"
Reading: The Hob's Bargain by Patricia Briggs
02 June 2008
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