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Nine Attempts to Clone Jason Nelson: Attempts 4-9 - Page 2

© Lewis laCook

work. This artificial line between text poetry and other forms of poetic expression simply ensures that text poetry will remain mired in an isolated community of academics. Poetry relies on this stopping time phenomenon to pull its readers into the work. So why not expand to include all the healing potions that hypermedia provides?"

 

Attempt 6: Time as a Rubber Ball

I'm reminded dimly (as I'm only capable of very dim cognitive operations by now) of Jean-Paul Sartre's experiments with time and realism. Sartre, in some experiments, tried to write events down in exactly the time they took to transpire, thereby folding compositional time, reading time, and event-time all within each other. Or even Gertrude Stein's famous continuous present. Literature has always viewed time as malleable, something to be bent at will, a toy. I can't continue along this path for long, however--Poem 1 cascades across us, leaving a diagonal tiretrack band of transparent skinny rectangles across our faces, all undulating to the backmasked sound Jason's programmed into the walls. So much for Emily, I think. So much, indeed, for all the linearity that literature's been fighting since the beginning. What would Joyce do if he had Flash 5? What would Finnegan's Wake be like if it had been coded? If, instead of pages to flip through, instead of the medium of the book with it's NECESSITY of linearity (page one...page two...), the reader was confronted with THE INTERFACE, buttons to touch, pages that melted with the reader's every motion? It's in such heady atmospheres that THE READER becomes THE USER, with all it's contraband associations intact. Hypermedia as the Pill, the Cure...the Fix.

"I like bouncy balls..." Jason murmurs as Poem 1 constricts into nothing, and Poem 2 begins to rain its green words over a black pane.

 

Attempt 9: A Brief Crashing Accident

"What?"

He sighs again. I can see he misses the wine as much as I do. "The building in which I teach four sections of freshman comp (a painful existence at times) is an early nineties prison style office building...all clean lines and function. The one redeeming aspect is that the building is open in the middle. I was fascinated by the possibilities of the space...."

"After losing an erratically bouncing ball over a balcony and watching

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