Contemporary Poetry

210 contemporary poetry

the ‘animated poem’ where the viewer or reader ‘is not asked to
do anything but watch and listen while the text performs’, ‘con-
ceptual blogs or websites’, ‘word toys’ where the user is ‘invited
to play with an experimental interface’ in effect creating her own
text, poetic works which are generated by computer programme,
and documentary websites such as UBU.com which Stefans credits
as offering ‘a collection of concrete, audio and avant-garde video
fi les’. In addition he adds collaborative poetic practices which ‘take
advantage of the forms of communication peculiar to electronic
media’ such as email. It should be noted that the recent CD-ROM
anthology Electronic Literature Collection (also available online at
http://collection.eliterature.org),,) advances the following expla-
nation of poetic electronic writing. Poetry in this context can be
understood as:

Writing native to the electronic environment is under con-

tinual construction (poiesis) by its creators and receivers.

Works of electronic literature are ‘poietic,’ in this sense, and

are often constructed by strategies analogous to those found

in experimental print poetry, or cinema, as well as by strate-

gies native to the digital environment.^8

In this defi nition electronic poetry straddles two objectives: it
establishes an ongoing conversation with an established trajec-
tory of experimental writing while also highlighting an electronic
process of revision and remaking.

CONTENT-SPECIFIC ELECTRONIC WRITING: JOHN
CAYLEY, JENNY WEIGHT, INGRID ANKERSON AND
MEGAN SAPNAR, REINER STRASSER AND M.D.
COVERLEY

Anglo-Canadian poet John Cayley is one of the most established of
electronic poets. He began experimenting with compositional tech-
niques on personal computers during the late seventies. Speaking
retrospectively, Cayley notes: