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Hi Doug-- Thanks for your enthusiasm--it's nice to hear this response. As the foundation and essence of the piece, Alison's poem is excellent ground, rich with elaborate images and texture all on its own. In its word-doc-page appearance (before I worked images into it) it is a prose poem, yes. The breaks (that you ask about) between words are an interesting quirk of the blogger template entry-screen (I'm no html wiz, I just tinker with stuff). I noticed when I started playing around with images in relation to text on-blog that when layering in the html for an image these breaks occur on the visible screen when the image-html is not dropped down a line or separated with a space (each of these creates a slightly different effect). I thought it was weird at first: undesirable, a variation on mistake. But then I grew to like the effect because it slows down the reading in interesting ways, and is unexpected in ways that make the medium part of the writing and reading. On the other hand, it changes the poem entirely from the authorial intentions of form. Some poets are interested in such effects (I like it in my poems), and some really do not (for good reason: when one puts one's terms in a certain place on the page or screen, then presumably, one likes them to stay there exactly as intended). So I am just tinkering, then, though at some point it really would be great to try to print-publish some of this, but that is not where I had yet been thinking on it--thanks for that idea. But in terms of experimentation, the interesting thing to me is that introducing any change of medium or of even slight constituent parts can alters the concept of the poem, opening it up to more choices. Thus, I was asking myself when tinkering with images these last few months, what happens when a huge or commanding change is not just introduced, but integrated (as much as the medium would allow for that). More questions and "delight" arise, I think in the interpretive choices, then, for reading a poem, and making it into something more than it was--integrating images electronically even in the humble little ways of a blog screen, makes the reading and it follows, the writing, less dependent on a notion of hegemonic authoring and naming, less author-dependent, less author-centered--even less traditionally text-centered. Fluidity of textuality becomes more readily apparent, even if also disruptive, since images are so commanding a presence to us culturally. And then with a collage-based addition of many kinds of images, the images seem to me to also lose some of that cultural hegemony in terms of reading/writing. These ideas, the less-author-centered/more reader-centered idea follows with, say, Foucault's problem with author-centered culture and then Stanley Fish's theories about readerly reception, that readers radicalize poems every time they read--especially where ambiguities of perception in space are concerned (Fish discusses it famously in terms of Milton's ambiguous enjambments in "Interpreting the Variorium"). Fish: "Interpretive strategies...are the shape of the reading, they give texts their shape, *making* them, rather than, as is usually the case, arising from them." I hope this clarifies the editorial thinking involved: Alison had kindly assented to my tinkering this way with her already very powerful poetry. Best Wishes, Chris Murray http://texfiles.blogspot.com http://e-po.blogspot.com http://www.uta.edu/english/znine -----Original Message----- From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Sun, 8 May 2005 09:02:09 -0600 Subject: Re: Alison Croggon featured on chris murray's Texfiles It looks terrific, Chris & Alison. I am wondering if you intend to publish it, say, in a book sometime, with the photos there where they are on the screen. As also the large spacings in some lines. Or am I more 'correct' to take it as essentially a prose poem, but with separate sections/lines? However it goes, it is powerful. Doug On 7-May-05, at 1:49 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote: > Hi All-- > > Just a note to let you know that I have begun a feature of Alison's > poetry at Texfiles, and each day or so will be posting a new poem of > Alison's over the span of a couple of weeks. > > Hope Y'all enjoy. > > Best Wishes, > > Chris Murray > http://texfiles.blogspot.com > http://e-po. blogspot.com > http://www.uta.edu/english/znine > > Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada (780) 436 3320 http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm I don’t need to hold back here in the union of forms Charles Olson