Poetics and Other Prose

(Drafts, Conference Camera Copies, Etc.)

Openings: The Connection Direct

A general statement about poetics, this essay was published as "liner notes" for Intergrams.

Questions About the Second Move

A short essay about the necessity and difficulties of having an authoring environment where the poet can collect scraps: a notebook. This piece was published in Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003.

An Interview on Poetics

A wide-ranging interview conducted in February, 2003 by Sandy Baldwin.

A Conversation with Jim Rosenberg

In January, 1996 I was the guest artist on ArtsWire's Interactive Forum. The resulting conversation, among myself, interactive text artist Judy Malloy, Anna Couey, and composer Doug Cohen, touches on a wide range of issues concerning hypertext, poetics, my artistic method, and other subjects.

The Interactive Diagram Sentence: Hypertext as a Medium of Thought

Paper that appeared in issue 30.2 of Visible Language guest edited by Eduardo Kac. Discusses a diagram channel for syntax, interactive juxtaposition, and hypertext taken into the fine structure of language. This is the closest I've been able to come to putting down in words what I mean by "hypertext as a medium of thought".

The Structure of Hypertext Activity

Formal paper presented in March 1996 at Hypertext '96. Discusses a framework for the rhetoric of hypertext activity, including such concepts as acteme, episode, session, gathering interface, and others.

And And: Conjunctive Hypertext and the Structure Acteme Juncture

Formal paper presented in August 2001 at Hypertext '01. Discusses conjunctive hypertext in detail.

Locus Looks at the Turing Play: Hypertextuality vs. Full Programmability

Formal paper presented in June 1998 at Hypertext '98. Discusses hypertext extensibility, algorithm localization, the user/algorithm relationship and many other topics related to questions of the relationship of programmability in general vs. hypertext. There is also a discussion of the French literature on cybertext difficult to obtain in English.

A Hypertextuality of Arbitrary Structure: A Writer’s Point of View

Position paper presented at the First Structural Computing Workshop at Hypertext '99. Discusses aspects of external structure, structure locality, parastructure, issues relating to the rendering of structure, structure behavior, and other issues.

A Prosody of Space / Non-linear Time

Formal paper orginally presented at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire, September 1996, published in Postmodern Culture 10.3. An expanded version of "Notes Toward a Non-linear Prosody of Space" below.

Hypertext in the Open Air: A Systemless Approach to Spatial Hypertext

Position paper presented at the Third Workshop on Spatial Hypertext at Hypertext '03. This paper describes the implementation of an authoring system as a light-weight set of classes within the environment Squeak, and discusses the implications of structure at the object level, including feral structure.

Reflections on Spatial Writing in Place

Position paper presented at the Fourth Workshop on Spatial Hypertext at Hypertext '04. This paper describes issues derived from the actual experience of interactive writing using the system described in the paper above, Hypertext in the Open Air.

Conditional Spatiality

Position paper presented at the Second Workshop on Spatial Hypertext at Hypertext '02. Conditional linking is common in hypertext, but conditional use of spatial structures is not. This paper discusses conditional spatiality by analogy to conditional linking.

User Interface Behaviors for Spatially Overlaid Implicit Structures

Position paper presented at the First Workshop on Spatial Hypertext at Hypertext '01. Discusses a variety of strategies for presenting spatially overlaid text objects.

Navigating Nowhere / Hypertext Infrawhere

Formal paper presented at the Literary Forum of the 1994 European Conference on Hypermedia Technology, Edinburgh, Sept. 1994 (ECHT'94) and published in SIGLINK Newsletter, vol.3 #3. Discusses simultaneities, conjunctive hypertext, spatiality, fragmentation of the lexia, and taking hypertext into the fine structure of language.

Inter-Field, the Acts

This essay on the subject of field is my contribution to The Field Project, a collaborative essay by mIEKAL aND, Jim Andrews, Thomas Bell, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Inna Kouper, Clemente Padin, Jim Rosenberg, and Ted Warnell organized by Mike Kelleher.

Visualities: The Shape of Openings Space, Buildings Invitation, Connection Guide Space

Essay published in Word Score Utterance Choreography edited by Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton, Writer's Forum, 1998, ISBN 0 86162 750 4. The premise of this book was to invite a diverse group of writers to submit a verbal poem, a visual poem, and an essay on the difference. (Each had to fit in a page.)

Poetics and Hypertext: Where are the hypertext poets?

Originally a USENET alt.hypertext article posted in response to the question "Where are the hypertext poets?" Published in PERFORATIONS 3 guest-edited by Richard Gess.

Notes Toward a Non-linear Prosody of Space

An E-mail message posted to the ht_lit mailing list. Presents a background on linear prosody, and then takes some first steps toward extending this to a non-linear, hypertext prosody of space.

The Word the Play Attaching at a Wide Interval

A short piece published in Judy Malloy's "Words on Works" series in Leonardo. This piece attempts to give the reader the feeling of what it is like to use my "semantic method".

Making Way for Making Way

A review of Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics by Michael Joyce. This review appeared in the SIGLINK Newsletter. My thanks to Keith Instone and SIGLINK for this opportunity.