While the sonnet is a most traditional form, the poems here call out to be experienced,
to be read, in radically different ways:
attend to the sound around you
as color shifts and a few onomatopoetic words appear;
grapple with and try to grasp
the intricacies of a word square based on an eitherhanded 14-letter word;
read snippets of song lyrics
and see N’ko glyphs, imagining music. This last and two other poems deal with
the works and words of Vinícius de Moraes, one letting you
set some of the text aflame,
the other
situating it on a street.
Some sonnets proclaim their authors immortal, but several here erase themselves:
Donne’s famous poem about resurrection
withers, a
sonnet shifts (if clicked)
and sputters, some
some of the US constitution dwindles.
Some selections fill the sonnet form’s vessel with symbols, namely,
lunar emoji that respond to a poem
of Mary Ellen Solt’s,
a worldwide assortment of colored vowels,
and the harmonious hues of
squares in a cohering column.
This issue has “standard” poetic texts with innovative presentation, too — one
inviting you to pick apart overlapping phrases
(are those magnetic poetry pieces?); one that
appears in a scatter of ups and (mostly) downs; one
that rolls out as a train approaches
in the dark.
There’s a sonnet-making machine that
offers “cypher” — nothing —
in numerous formulations; another that presents
recombined poems about AI from an “AI,”
and yet another that uses the sonnet’s syllable and line counts to
shape a poem at the letter level.
You’ll find tiny poetic systems here that generate
monologues (formulaic ones from an NPC),
text-message
dialogues (terse colloquial exchanges),
and
verses that descend for many strata.
When you’ve had enough of text generation,
use a gym-poem to give you instructions,
as a personal sonnet trainer would, on how to write.
Among the works here are some very visual ones that
allow
prismatic progression through generated text,
fill in a face
with (fourteen) upside-down frown lines,
and
pair headlines with trios of emoji.
Make sure you’ve got sound on for contributions that
let you play, musically, in Shakespearean form
(if you’ve up to the challenge) or
pluck a tetradeca-string instrument.
There’s a
miniature hypertext that raises questions
and shuffles sentences. The mouse is not the only means of forging ahead, though:
with arrow keys, you can
unfold grids of methodologies
for understanding the world.