Twelve Blue, Michael Joyce.

Perhaps you wonder why I chose this picture for a post about Twelve Blue, the poem by Michael Joyce.
Well, it came up in a Google image search for the poet, and led me to a blog that promised me that this very hot dog would sing Twelve Blue to me while it was in the shower. Not the strangest promise anyone has ever made me, but I was intrigued. It didn't keep its promise, much to my disappointment. Hot Dogs are never to be trusted.

Similarly, I think my high expectations were to blame for my lack of enthusiasm for the hypertext piece.

The name Twelve Blue initially made me think of those math games I used to have to play in elementary school. Twelve blue cats eat twelve blue apples, so how long will it take for train A to pass train B? That kind of thing.

Anyway ... The aspect of Michael Joyce's hypertextual poetry that I found most interesting is his prose. It is really beautiful. His references to women stand out to me, using references to Gaugin and carnies. He uses alot of earthly and classic imagery, things pertaining to nature and the like. His poetry is astonishingly sensual for the medium he uses. To me, this juxtaposition is really ironic (and I reckon also a little distracting). Based on the fact that it is a hypertext poem, I found that I had lower expectations for the quality of his actual writing, and expected to be more astonished by the flashiness of the hypertext. I anticipated more stimulation, more qimmicky things. I assumed the medium would naturally become the message, with its overpowering and voltaic qualities.

On the side of the screen are panels with a bunch of different coloured lines, which arrangement you can change by clicking on - the purpose of this is unclear to me. According to Greg Ulmer, they represent the StorySpace network, and each line is a link to another document. But nothing happens when I click it. I feel like I'm missing something here.

In terms of content, the cumulative effect of the poem is supposed to be that of drowning, Greg tells me. That, and an "awareness that this image of drowning in its totality is the signifier for some unstated, abstract, perhaps inarticulable signification." Gregs explanation is a little vague to me, but from what I can understand, but I feel the finality thing. The last panel of the poem, starting with "everything can be read", has a sort of resolution to it that evokes feelings of the details of humanly life; the whorls of a rose, armpit, the sigh of rain, light through high branches of blue pines, whisper, every man and his mother, every woman and her lover ... culminating to a catharsis. There is nothing more than these details.

All the things I imagine would flash before your eyes during the last moments of drowning.

Hence, I attribute the profundity of this poem to Joyce's writing skills. I would probably be just as in awe if I read this on a peice of paper. If not more. Call me old fashioned, but I have a hard time anticipating seeing poems of Tennyson and Rossetti quality in electronic form. To me, the medium simply doesn't lend itself to the seemingly effortless masterpeices that were scrawled on parchment under a willow tree on a bank somewhere at dawn, in "ye ole' days". That's what I picture when I think of classic poetry.