http://www.as.wvu.edu/clcold/epoetry/bios.html

In searching for the web poet to use for my essay I finally stumbled across a site that might help me. This above link shows a bunch of artists who were in some e-poetry festival a couple of years ago, and although most of them aren’t in English, there are some familiar names there, such as Nicolas Clauss, the guy behind the ‘flying puppet’ website, who did an amazing piece for this festival called ‘look at me’. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/clauss/lookatme.htm - which can be viewed at this link. However I can’t really say that it would work as just poetry because there is no text involved and the only words spoken are those of the title, however it is still an amazing flash piece – one that stays with you afterwards. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frAme/index.cfm?article=102 – this is an ‘introduction’ to the Clauss work by Simon Mills. It reminds me of a certain other visual artists work but I can’t remember the name right this minute…
I also looked at some work by a guy called Tallan Memmott. The work was called [n]+semble recombinant tone poem and I think this is the link even thought for some reason it looks like a broken link?? http://memmott.org/talan/rtp27/ I Don’t know but you can find him on the main www.as.wvu/edu link (up the top) anyway. This was an interesting piece because again no words were involved, instead it was made of sounds that you made via interactivity. This got me re-thinking the idea of a poem, however in terms of my essay, again I think this may be too much of an abstract idea?? Not sure though on what is allowed.
Another artist that I looked at was Aya Natalia Karpinska. Her work called “Nobody Knows But You” looked really interesting however I couldn’t view it because it was apparently set up in a 3D space in a gallery. It gave the option to view video footage from the gallery but it was 13MB and I tried to download it but it didn’t work. What I could do though was download the words to the poem which was interesting and I’ll paste them below. Also I could look at a ‘map’ of the controls (how people in the gallery could interact with the piece) which was made of a playstation controller which I thought was very cool!! Wish I could view her work because she is the best I’ve found in terms of actually using poetry etc. I will try to look into her stuff a bit more.

should we leave without you
i need to talk to you just a little bit more
didn’t think hatred would be so
hard to move
a thick layer of fat on the
inside. doesn’t melt away with
the heat of love.
i want it out
to evaporate under the glare of confidence
i’ll spit every doubt
even if my teeth turn grime
in the process
i’ll let go
do something special
i began to chat with
the penthouse poet
with the smell of my slick salt skin
radiating into the still elevator non-air
i stink of youth.
she gives me eight floors of anecdotes
i look her up her verses are chill and old
of winter, absent neighbors
later later i see her at the salon
on our street i don’t say anything
turn my head and
watch my fingers become rose-red
i chose red again
i feel beautiful
wishing for the tremendous quiet
that will change me
strength of reality
fades when you don’t speak
it can curdle and get hard
like wintergarden rot
do i hate the wrong metaphors for healing,
i always tried to leak out the poison
or draw it out or have it evaporate
from my palms
buddha makes it seem so easy
i’ve written the notation for the
dispersion of negativity, and am
seeking voices to sing it for me
how much do you care
reach out to someone who isn’t there
separate mutliple falls from heaven
with a comma
then confess
i’ve picked my enemies
lined up like sharpened pencils
attack them in small multiples
small enough
to change nothing
Aya Natalia Karpinska text for VJ poem nobody knows but you Fall 2005

And below is her artists statement that explains better than I did about her piece.

“artist's statement
nobody knows but you was written for Double-Cute Battle Mode, an application prototype for a VJ (video jockey) remix battle. DCBM allows two players to combine visuals and special effects in a playful competition for screen space. Using joysticks, players plug their imagination into their computer and share a creative space in an intuitive video-game style interaction. The piece was conceived as a way to ease text back into an image-dominated culture by treating it simultaneously as a visual special effect and as a poem.
The twenty-three verses appear on a plane in three-dimensional space. A cube shape displays additional visuals. Both the cube and the plane may be scaled and rotated, and the reader has control over which verse or image is displayed.
You may notice in the image at top left, or while watching the documentation video, a twelve-year-old girl plopped down in front of the installation. She played with the piece on and off for three hours. She began singing the words, making up melodies and turning certain verses into refrains. There is a clear lack of literature that responds to the intellectual and creative needs of young people today. I hope that interactive writing can help to fill that gap.
The original DCBM program was created with Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena.
Aya Natalia Karpinska, Fall 2005”

Another piece that I found on this poetry festival site was a guy called Chris Funkhouser, and his piece was actually a mp3 track that I had to download to my computer. It was called ‘Found Poem’. It was great!! I was really hoping there would be visuals to accompany it but it didn’t. It was a great song though made out of something he had obviously found, which seemed to be a shopping list. It’s fantastic I reckon! It’s very funny too. Just for the fact that it’s funny to imagine someone making a list like this – it is very ransom and interesting. I don’t know how to get a copy of the lyrics though so I will just have to listen to it and copy them out from what I hear…

(it starts with saying where and when he found the poem but I can’t really understand it so I won’t type it)
“make a list real quick
1. necklace like mine.
2. green socks.
3. jewelry box
4. Tupperware
5. toaster
6. sweaters
7. cell phone cable and Velcro
8. remote caddy
9. salt and pepper shakers
10. toothbrush replacement for sonic care
11. return clock to shop-rite”

(then it does some repetition of some of these things and digitally fiddles with them etc)
I find it interesting how you can (I think) clearly tell the gender and possibly age of this person by the things on this list. This is abstracted by the fact the voice is a young man’s. This is evidentially taking a leaf out of performance poetry’s book, as the way he uses his voice is entertaining and reliant on a beat. Obviously this is because it is used in a song so there is an actual beat in the background, but of course it goes further than this.

Well now I am going to take a break and perhaps come back to my research later tonight, as there are plenty more artists in this list that I still have yet to have a look at. I also saw Jason from our Uni in this list haha. I was actually contemplating using him, however I haven't seen many of his works that are text based - however I do like his little improvisational movies called 'Staggering Legends of the Inane' which I would regard as poetry, prose poetry, and they are performed in a beat type way, however they are hardly digital appart from the fact that they are done with a digital camera, and they are in no way interactive. But they are still very interesting to me and perhaps I will think about it further, or perhaps I should just generally ask in class what is considered good or too abstract to be called 'cyber poetry' for our assignment. I am hoping to get my artist for my essay by the end of this weekend (it is currently Saturday night).