P.o.E.M.M.

P.o.E.M.M., a group of interactive applications created by Jason Edward Lewis & Bruno Nadeau, allow for iOS users to directly touch, create, and manipulate works of e-poetry. The first example, titled What They Speak When They Speak To Me, is a piece of e-poetry that unfolds before your eyes, though only by way of the user swiping around the display. As you move your finger, floating letters come to fruition and begin forming complete lines on the trail that your finger has left in its wake. In piecing together this poem, you see a story unfold. As stated on the P.o.E.M.M. site, "the interaction is designed to echo the text’s concern with the difficulty in establishing lines of communication then in a foreign place, and the necessity for intense concentration such efforts require".

Another example of this piece of e-poetry is The World That Surrounds You Wants Your Death. To better understand the basis of this piece, you must look at a quote by Paula Gunn Allen:

“When you’ve gone through five hundred years of genocidal experiences, when you know that the other world that surrounds you wants your death and that’s all it wants, you get bitter. And you don’t get over it. It starts getting passed on almost genetically. It makes for wit, for incredible wit. But under the wit there is a bite.”

According to the P.o.E.M.M. site, "The World That Surrounds You Wants Your Death takes its cue from Allen’s observation of what it means for a culture to live, generation after generation, in an environment that actively strives for that culture’s demise". In interacting with this poem, the user is presented with many moving lines of horizontal text. Upon swiping from left to right, or vice versa, and depending on the force with which you performed the action, the text will move accordingly with the motion you made. This piece is perhaps depressing to some, but invaluable within the context of e-poetry and human interaction.

See Below: Screenshot of The World That Surrounds You Watns Your Death via poemm.net

P.o.E.M.M. is an important and interesting piece of interactive e-poetry and both is and represents an example of how such literature and technological crossover(s) may not only coexist, but open the doorway to a much broader, more vast, and creative learning environment.

Sean McCarney