Attempt 1: The Hypnotist and His Spell
We've been stone-cold awake for days, he mad-haired, hunched over his terminal, sometimes giggling, sometimes moaning when things on the screen don't go as well as he wants them; I in the corners of the laboratory, watching him as he tries to clone his poem. There will be nine attempts, he tells me. Beginning with attempt zero. My notes on attempt zero are a bit scrambled: the absinthe, the merlot, the translucent continents that flow from his screen to grip the air. In the morning I re-read them: "..gray background, black text, interface up top under title--small boxes out of order, numbered--the text seems descriptive of the animation..." This, interspersed with granules of Jason's poem: "By themselves they seem silly, artless and clumsy//pulling legs and heads through holes."
In August he finished his MFA in poetry with a concentration in multimedia forms at Bowling Green, Ohio, and he's clearly both an accomplished poet and hypermedia artist. I knew, in the carriage rocking its slow clattered way to the villa, that I was going to be in the presence of a very gifted young man; gifted enough to have garnered a place for his poetry and flash work in venues as rich and integral as Big Allis, Combo, Cross-Connect, Fish Drum, Happy, Kenning, Syllogism, Verse, Vox, and Yefief. I'd seen his work before: a blinding, kinetic blend of interface, colorful geometrical animation, altered haunting sound, and poetry. But in 2001 it was all still too new: just what are you, Jason Nelson, I asked him at our first meeting, clicking through his Heliopods hyperpoem series: are you a poet? a painter? a musician? a programmer?
"I want to be a hypnotist," he said then, laughing. "A wagon
