Hello again Edward!

I apologize for not responding sooner than this. I had
to meet a deadline for another article before I could
give my full attention to this one. This interview I'm
doing with you will be for either the next installment
of my column, to run on Sunday May 6, or for the one
to run 2 weeks from that day, though I'm not yet sure
what the focus should be. It was your Blackbird poems
that caught my eye, so maybe I'll focus on
animated/kinetic poetry.

> reluctantly my
> thoughts were starting to turn in the direction of
> self-publication -

This is one of the things I find most exciting about
the Internet. It's allowing many people to consider a
kind of self-publishing when they may not have wanted
or know how to do this before.

> is that when I was in 
> my twenties I spent a couple of years editing a very
> small poetry magazine, 

Is the magazine still in existence? Did you start it
yourself? What sort of poems did you favor?

> Secondly, people don't want to read conventional
> novels online. I've never
> bought into the theory that people won't read prose
> off a computer - and I
> think the success of blogs has now disproved this -
> but reading a 
> conventional novel is something different.

A-ha. Now this is an interesting point you bring up.
You're right, of course, people are reading fiction
and creative nonfiction on blogs, websites, and even
in emails that are sent to them at regular intervals.
When you say reading a conventional novel, do you mean
it's only the length that would keep someone from
reading on-screen? Some people do publish their novels
in chapters on their blogs--do you think this is bound
to be unsuccessful? It seems to me that it could work,
especially in the serial format, like in the old days
of serial fiction appearing in newspapers.

> Instead of telling a story sequentially,
> you could tell the same
> story from several different points of view, and
> randomise the sections so
> that the different points of view could be read in
> any order. This idea 
> interested me very much, so I then
> started writing nonlinear fiction.

Oh, interesting. Could you please direct me to a piece
of your nonlinear fiction so that I could see just
what you mean by this?

> a series of essays about 
> hyperliterature in The PN Review, which is quite a
> well-known literary 
> periodical here in the UK; and I was then contacted
> and asked to write more 
> essays by trAce, which was a creative writing centre
> with a particular 
> interest in new media work, run out of the Trent
> University in Nottingham. 

Do you think there's an acceptance in traditional
literary circles (journals, the academy) of
hyperliterature?

>  Lots of people
> have come online from 
> other disciplines - film, music, fine art, comics,
> programming - and digital 
> literature shades into these other disciplines at
> its edges. 

Yes, I have found this to be the case too. 

Edward, do you consider your poems on the theme of
"Blackbird" to be a form of literary criticism, since
they are in part an interpretation? I wonder about
this question for my owrn work, since I have written
poems in the style of famous poems and consider them
to be my own work, truly, yet not entirely mine at the
same time, if this makes sense.

This is an abstract question, I know, but in terms of
the visual dimension of animated/kinetic poems--why?
What about these features deepen the writer's or
reader's experience of a poem? And ... at what point
does something that moves and makes noise stop being a
poem and start being another art form altogether?

So many questions! 

Katie

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