Tuesday, June 12, 2001

Students' Poetry Web Site Showcases Hypertext Verse By JESSICA LUDWIG Words, along with images of a car driving down a street, run like a film unspooling through a still picture of a woman applying lipstick. At times, the words are distant and unreadable, but a voice recites them to a strumming guitar. Move the cursor and the film flows from left to right, or from right to left, filling the screen and then receding, creating a visual Doppler effect. Such is the feeling of motion in "Cruising," one of the digital poems in the spring 2001 issue of Poems That Go, an online project that seeks "to unite words, design, music, and motion and to celebrate poetry through technology and the Internet." The issue contains four new digital works of poetry, which are designed using programs like PhotoShop and require Flash software for viewing. The site was created by Megan Sapnar, a graduate student in Georgetown University's Communications, Culture, and Technology program, and Ingrid Ankerson, a graduate student in publication design at the University of Baltimore. They were inspired to begin the project after attending a poetry reading at which a sign-language interpreter was signing each work. They found themselves watching the signer and observing how the signs added a visual dimension to the reading. The two women are also the creators of "Cruising." In celebration of the site's first anniversary, the two editors have added a text feature for each submission, in which the poems' writers and designers comment on their work. The site also has a list of links to other online experimental poetry magazines and projects, such as Born Magazine, and to online scholarly essays on multimedia and literature. The site also has a new discussion forum. Ms. Sapnar and Ms. Ankerson hope that these features will both attract a broader audience to the site and encourage theoretical discussion about digital poetry. The site receives about 1,000 hits daily, but Ms. Sapnar and Ms. Ankerson say many visitors are "teenage boys looking for poems for their girlfriends." The two typically receive about 10 fully designed poetry submissions for each issue. "We will get good poets that don't know any technology -- the other end is the technology people who can do cool, flashy stuff but can't write," says Ms. Sapnar. Ideally, the submissions do more than just create a cartoon of the poem, they say. Ms. Ankerson says she used to write first and then develop the visual effects for the poem, but now both creative processes have melded. "We're trying to write for the Web, to create something that can't exist on paper," she says. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky whose focus is humanities computing, says that writers need to consider not only the media they write in but also the tools influencing that media. He notes that cinema, like poetry, is time-dependent, and that software like Flash dramatizes lyric progression. "What they're really doing is writing for a particular software application," says Mr. Kirschenbaum. Both of the site's developers were advertising majors, and they bring to the site a keen sense for portraying poetry's words and images. Ms. Sapnar says her affinities for poetry and advertising are related: "What I always liked about advertising was you had to tell a story in 30 seconds or less." Ms. Ankerson says the Web site challenges visitors to think about how "new media borrows from other media, and about how it's unique." She says that finding a balance between interactivity and narration is a particular challenge of hypertext poetry. Users can influence how they read and even what they read in "Dissolution," another work featured this spring. The piece presents a rectangular panel divided into 32 illustrated squares, including an eye's reflected image of birthday candles, a survey of rooftops, and scenes from nature. According to the author's comments, the work looks at "the idea of patchwork and distance and perspective." Moving the cursor over each square magnifies the image so that it fills the entire panel and calls up a segment of verse. The user can navigate along the squares horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, or can skip among them, leaving out segments of verse altogether. While Mr. Kirschenbaum says that there is a uniformity to the pieces on the Poems That Go site, mainly because of software-design limitations, he adds, "It's a very strong, interesting site." He calls it a "hybrid between a poetic experience and a cinematic experience." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

President proposes new programs to study greenhouse emissions Professor at U. of Wisconsin-Superior, accused of harassing students, is fired 12 new chief executives announced Students' poetry Web site showcases hypertext verse Senate passes a bill extending copyright exemption to online courses