A Hypertext Book
The hypertext book of poems, entitled TRY ME., can be viewed here.
Spam, or more colloquially known as unsolicited junk email, is collaged to create this series of hypertext poems. I collected spam over the course of an eight month period and then began working the magic. Embedded passages of literature are therefore found in the spam. The original spam emails are rearranged and collaged with the embedded literature to form a new and hybrid poem.
I kept all of the words from the original literature in the process of collaging the poems that constitute TRY ME. Literary excerpts include J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Constraint
While an anagram is the rearrangement of letters from a given word or phrase to another, a lexical anagram is the rearrangement of a lexicon or words from one given body of text to another. I employed a ‘lexical anagram’ as a binding constraint to conjoin the writing of this digital book of poems. This conjoining of words means that all of the words from the source body are woven into the new one.
Interaction
A reader interacts with TRY ME. by clicking on a series of hyperlinks that appear on each new page. Each hyperlink changes the context and meaning of the preceding poem. Text blinks and moves throughout the page to modify how each of the poems is read on subsequent pages. The poems are displayed in chronological order from which the spam was found. The original date shows the date in 2006 from which the spam was retrieved.
