Hypertext Poetry and Waiting Light 2.0 by risa
There is much buzz on the web about the need for designers to engage with the possibilites of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. The emphasis out there is largely on demonstrating CSS’s ability to enable style switching- transforming the entire look of a page in and around the same content and structure. And this is lovely and cool, although I haven’t totally grasped all the ways that it will be useful. We have attempted, on Open, to make one practical use of it by offering our readers some choices in how they will view our site. (You will find these options in the right hand corner of the top banner.) This was motivated by my Grampa reminding me that he has red/green colour blindness, and so all our fancy red text was kind of a blur to him. Now he can read it big and blue if he likes, and I get to feel like we’ve come one small step closer to open.
I have gotten to do some experimentation with CSS myself, and the fact that this kind of coding has been accessible and logical to me is what has really convinced me that CSS is something special. Because it’s not that hard, and I’m not (by any means) a programmer. Certainly, it helps a great deal that I have one (programmer, that is) living in my house and inclined to help me out, but still the degree to which I engaged with this and made things with it is, from my perspective, uncanny.
The fact of separating out style from the function, structure (architecture?) of the xhtml made it possible for me to view code and understand it. Previously I had gone to “View” in my browser, and then “Page Source” and stared numbly at the nicely coloured gobbledygook; but once I saw types of coding tasks separated out in separate pages the whole fandango started to make sense. And writing simple xhtml to make pages and links suddenly seemed so much easier, prettier and more logical then fiddling around with the awkward surfaces of Dreamweaver.
I am interested in the ways that this makes Hypertext creative writing a more feasible and pleasurable experience- both for the writer and the reader. My first experimentation with this is called Waiting Light.
And this, below, is a new version of the poem Waiting Light, not yet webpaged and css’ed. I wrote the first one in a flurry of excitement that fed right into my excitement about this new media, and since then, I have revisted the poetry itself and continued working to refine it. I deliberated about not posting this new version here until I had time to work it into a new web document. This is definitely an ongoing project- but I decided that’s ok, because all writing is.
Waiting Light 2.0
The water in the slow moving,
cool-breeze clouds
- stretched cotton, fleeced,
with the blue shot softly through -
crystallized in a ring of thin banded light early this afternoon;
the product of an equation generously counted out by the whiteyellow sun,
over the hill, above the old convent’s hatted bell
and i thought about the crystal somewhere buried in my machine-
between computing and the current-
dolling out the careful waves of energy; the clock cycles of code.
Of how a maker emerges sometimes, unexpectedly like love,
and crystallizes currents of ideas and desires.
How Defoe became Crusoe to condense into a listed, layered light
the twisted fears and dreamings of early, lonely capital.
How Eliot taught me that we each confirm our prison,
but Pound crystallized
the whole long world of longing, walking into wartime, sorrow
with blue plums.
and how we are like water, turning our faces to be touched
by the waiting light.
Strung and pulled in soft formations,
or weighted low and wet and dark,
the flickering and quiet coloured covenant runs through us all,
even in the aftermath of terror
in the still and same green evening
on our way down into the park.
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