Contemporary Poetry

conclusion 213

the authoritative and often appropriative narrative of the travel
guide.
As a fl ash poem, Cruising ( 2001 ) uses oral recitation written
from the perspective of a young teenage girl driving in her friend’s
car up and down Main Street in small-town Wisconsin.^16 Ingrid
Ankerson and Megan Sapnar’s collaboration presents fi lmic black-
and-white images played at varying speeds and sizes, showing
neon signs, billboards and shop hoardings. In addition a ribbon
of script is also performed throughout, and can be rewound
or fast-forwarded in varying sizes. The recitation describes a
coming-of-age ritual in the form of cruising: ‘we wanted love
maybe in a pick up truck’. The poem mirrors the cinematic
visual world which is created, since the speaker associates night
rolling through Mary Jo’s father’s station wagon with movie
credits. As an example of visual poetry, Ankerson and Sapnar
enter into the adrenalin-fuelled world of the young women. The
speaker declares that, ‘I was the skinny girl in the bag sniffi ng
the street like a dog’ and that they all were ‘eyeing life in a car we
couldn’t yet take to the world’. Above all the interaction required
by Cruising creates an experiential poem, as the authors’ notes
indicate:

Cruising reinforces the spatial and temporal themes of the

poem by requiring the user to learn how to ‘drive’ the text. A

new user must fi rst struggle with gaining control of the speed,

the direction, and the scale in order to follow the textual path

of the narrative... The viewer moves between reading text

and experiencing a fi lmic fl ow of images – but cannot exactly

have both at the same time. In this way, the work seeks to

highlight the materiality of text, fi lm, and interface.^17

Finally, Reiner Strasser’s poetic collaboration with M. D.
Coverley, ii – in the white darkness ( 2004 ), explores the experience
of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients.^18 Building from the expe-
riential element that an electronic poem can offer, the text explores
dimensions of memory. Coverley states that: ‘It was not the erasure
that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no
longer can identify’.^19 The interface consists of pulsing dots, which