image


The poems in oooxxxooo are images on a screen as much as they are words. The words in "Mother Earth" snake their way up my screen as I scroll through the poem to read it all. Another text, " Look", is shaped like an apple or a circle or maybe an eye. When I follow a link my screen goes black, and I have to scroll sideways or downwards to find the words, hidden away in a corner, reminding me how my always-too-small screen limits my vision. Another screen is filled with blinking stars and motionless circles.

Martin's poems are visual. Traditionally it's the sound and rhythm of words that are the most important physical devices in poetry. In concrete poetry, such as this, typography carries meaning, as do the links and the colours.

This is not as glamourous as a lot of new media work. It requires no plugins and uses little colour, animation, there are no polished graphics. Perhaps its technical simplicity lets the meaning slip in (and between) more fluidly. It is self-sufficient and unlikely to go out of style.

Jill Walker: A Child's Game Confused
A hypertextual essay presented by
Journal of Digital Information