Kominos:
Sorry I'm a bit late, but I've been to the beach today!
Firstly, I like your hypertext/visual poetry, the immediacy of sound,
colours of the ocean, the way that language breaks and rolls like the sea.
And in here, I believe, as with any creative process, the internet is the
future and does create endless possibilities. And what you are doing is
giving the viewer a sensual scape, a peaceful scene, perhaps a memory, last
weekend at the beach, a beach for those in the desert. However, for me it
is short-lived and it's a bit like concrete poetry where after a time, the
chalk fades.
The written verse, for me at least, has a permanence. I can go back again
and again, to my bookshelves and be flawed, time and time again, by a poetic
phrase that had me instantly captured the moment I read it. To name one,
would be William Carlos Williams' - 'The Red Wheelbarrow' -love the imagery,
its conciseness, its unique enjambment breaking the imagery to suggest that
the *red wheelbarrow* in the rain is more than the sum of its parts - that
it does more than stand in the rain beside the white chickens. To me that is
'poetry.'
So, for me, William's poem, with that visual imagery, will never be
diminished, rather it enlargens. To be able to tap into that kind of hands
on quality (as with many other poems) helps me in the progression of my own
work.

>could i ask you if, these days, with multi channel pay tv, the internet,
>etc., if not the role of poetry in this area, ie capturing images, scenes
>or panoramas, has been somewhat diminished.

oh, no, you cannot compare those two mediums with poetry.
BUT A David Attenborough documentary, which shows great scenes and
panoramas, does attack my conscience as a writer. He reminds us about our
fragile planet. Here we can come in, as poets. We have a choice to write
about what we still have, what may be endangered, what will disappear. For
example, our old growth forests or the more recent corporate carnage that
could destroy our Ningaloo reef, here in the West. (Thank god, Tim Winton is
helping with conservation as he is the Vice-President of the Australian
Marine Conservation Society.)

I digress, but surely this enhances the need for poets to write, as Liz
says, 'we desperately need to do/have balm, nourishment, challenge, deep
thought, dreams, intense driven packed extreme mad, language, images.'

Perhaps, hypertext can contain poetry which is intense and conscience
driven. As you are calling it poetry, cyber/hypertext has to grab the reader
as well with words, because poetry works on that principle! Imagine for a
moment, a red wheelbarrow, eg. Williams' words, the rain, some white
chickens, all in hypertext. It's your genre, you have to knock our socks
off!
>
>you mention spaciality as if it were place.
>the spaciality i refer to is a metaphorically internal one, inside the
>head, which lifts you from the landscape and places you in some space where
>time and place are immaterial, something like good sex or drugs.

no, I meant it as the word suggests, um! yours is a bit like a Club Med
escape to the senses. As for me, I sometimes include the pagan philosophy of
horoscopes in my work, that is a form of spaciality - a mind searching for a
known future.
Cheers
Helen

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