Gassing Up & Heading Out
Why Am I Doing This?
In the Fall of '98 I took a graduate English class on writing hypertext at Virginia Commonwealth University. I thought it would be a fun class to take because we got to work with computers and both of the instructors for the class, Dr. Elizabeth Cooper and Michael Keller, were well-versed in hypertext.
I had first been introduced to hypertext by Michael Keller the previous semester when I was a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department computer lab. Keller is the Director of the Computer Center for the English Department, and during one of our practicums, he showed a cynical bunch of grad students the media known as hyperfiction. We read Michael Joyce's afternoon and others. He also taught us how to use StorySpace.
While I, and most of my classmates, found hyperfiction incredibly frustrating to read (because we had not yet learned to NOT read linearly, as I call it), I was also intrigued by its possibilities. As an MFA poetry student, I wanted to better understand how to incorporate graphics into poetry, and manipulate hyperpoetry to make the leaps that Robert Bly and many of the Latin-American poets such as Lorca and Borge accomplish in their flat texts.
I thought that hypermedia would allow poetry to become much more lyrical, and would allow cycles within the poems which their flat counterparts could not achieve. What I didn't know was how difficult the technical aspects of making that happen would be.
I signed up for the Hypertext class, and was assigned one major project -- to create a hypertext of our choosing, either academic or creative, with an accompanying metatext discussing our processes in creating our texts (hence, here you are). I though I wanted to do a creative project, only because I though it would be easier. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Gassing Up &
Heading OutHeading South Routes of Travel
(Ways To Read)