I scatter the words of the old-fashioned poem across the screen with my mouse, much as my toddler relishes throwing her lego blocks willy nilly across the floor. The words, unlike the lego blocks, remain neatly contained within the spinning disc that holds the poem. Remembering the instruction (“Both the poem and the disc are playable”), I pull at the disc, and I am delighted to find that jiggling the disc changes the sound of the remnents of the poem that are being read, like when a DJ pulls at an LP.

I always mean to read more electronic literature. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write about at least one piece of e-lit each week on my blog. I’m not intending lengthy in-depth analyses or reviews, just little blog posts about my immediate responses to the work. This morning I read (or played) Alan Bigelow’s “This is Not a Poem”, published in 2010.

Why such a very hackneyed poem, though? A poem I know I have heard, that really isn’t a very interesting poem, which is probably the point. It is, however, a poem about being a poem. The title of the remix is “This is Not a Poem”, which, I suppose, makes it very much about being (or not being) a poem.

The starting point for the remix is “Tree”, by Joyce Kilmer, who died in 1918:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Reading as destruction seems to be a fairly constant trope in electronic literature. Noah Wardrip-Fruin et.al’s Screen is for me the standard against which I measure such works. Screen was made for a cave, so you stand inside it with your 3D glasses and use a glove to hit words back against the wall as they fall off it. Your attempts to keep the text intact are doomed though, and soon enough all the words fall all over you (it feels fantastic). The text of Screen is also about how hard it is to hold on to memories, to moments.

But what is “This is not a poem” about? Maybe it’s enough that it’s about the simple fun of tearing apart old poems, just as my toddler loves to scatter her blocks all around the room.