The Hyperpoems open the door to multi-theme asynchronous moving poetry, as a new way of reading words which are constantly rearranging themselves. The scrolling lines start all together, but since the lines have different lengths, they get out of sync quickly. Since the motion is slow, you can read parts of different lines at will, moving over the range of the poem in a new and surprising mode. Try to read snatches of lines as your eye moves up and down while the words move right to left. Stay with the poem a while, reading and remembering phrases and how they fit together, for an entirely different poetic experience.
Poetry as the vibrant expression of a recombinant language and culture find a niche in hypertext. New meanings can be discovered, followed, created and recreated anew. Hyper poetry can be made up of images, text and flash animation, but above all, hyperlinks. The idea is that everything contributes to the poetic (if you use Landow’s definition, surprising and delightful) nature of the work, so your hyperlinks have to add some sort of meaning to what the reader (or more accurately, user) can see. Although one can see the benefit of studying this - there is a lot of academic writing about hypertext in narrative, what this means for literature and students and academia etc because it doesn’t really interest all, I am not keen to go down that path. Poetry has too long been relegated to the academy. As such, it alienates its audience and makes it difficult for poets to inject their work into the world. Poets deserve a place for their work to live and be seen. Much more importantly, though, the world deserves to see the work of new poets unfiltered—without having to look through the lens of gatekeepers. It is an effort to take poetry back. It is a shift in thinking. It is a public space where real people can interact with real poems. It is a revolution.
