I’ve been writing poetry for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been publishing it since the early ’80s. My work appeared in many printed magazines and a few anthologies, and then in 1992 my first book, A Wandering City, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. (See the review of A Wandering City on this Web site.) During this time I was making my living writing about computers, so I became increasingly interested in the potential of digital media for art and literature. In the early ’90s I ventured into the field of interactive multimedia poetry, unaware of the few other people who were also working in it at the time. I became so caught up in the excitement of exploring a completely new medium that I gradually abandoned writing poetry for print in favor of fashioning work for the computer screen. Graphics, audio, animation, and interactive elements became regular companions to the words in my poetry.

My electronic work was first exhibited widely in the form of computer-based installations, then distributed on disk, and finally presented on the Web. My poetry activities were supplemented by frequently writing and lecturing about the emerging field of electronic literature. In 1995 I began teaching hypertext poetry and fiction for the New School University’s online program. In 1997 I created Word Circuits, a Web site for electronic poetry and fiction. A few years later I helped create the Electronic Literature Directory, which I currently supervise.

During the past few years I’ve developed a renewed interest in writing poetry for print, and I now divide my time between writing for the page and for the screen. Some of my poems even find a home in both media. An example of this is Paper Music, Ear Ink, which appears in this online issue of Notre Dame Review as a sequence of Web poems replete with graphics and audio. A couple of these poems also appear in the printed edition of the Review, and the entire series will appear in print in my next book. The sequence reflects my lifelong preoccupation with music. I majored in music in college and hold an MA in musicology. I had to give up playing years ago, because of repetitive strain problems, but this hasn’t dampened my love for the art. I have composed music for some of my electronic poetry, and “Paper Music, Ear Ink” is a homage of sorts to this most mysterious of all arts. One of the things that fascinates me about music is that its effect on us is inexplicable. The visual and literary arts move us by mimicking (or subverting) reality, but why should mere sounds arouse deep emotions when they bear little if any relationship to what our ears may encounter in the “natural” world? These poems aren’t “about” music. They simply try to appropriate, by association, some of the peculiar power that music has over us.

This issue also includes links to some representative examples of my interactive poetry. Clues (work in progress) explores the nature of communication, knowledge, and identity through the language and postures of mystery fiction. It's a metaphysical whodunit that invites you to solve the mystery by uncovering clues linked to images throughout the work. The search becomes a game that leads you down wooded trails, back alleys, and empty hallways. Which characters should you pursue? Which objects should you investigate? To win the game, you must separate all the clues from the red herrings. Your final score determines the outcome of the text. But is the mystery really soluble? Is winning actually better than losing? Are the answers or the questions more revealing?

The Seasons (Eastgate Hypertext Reading Room, 1999–2000) is a series of hypertext poems, one representing each season. That is to say, it will eventually be a series of four poems. Currently only two poems—“Dispossession” and “Penetration,” representing winter and spring—have been written. “Penetration” explores change. The immigrant’s experience of changing homelands, the seasonal changes within those lands themselves, and evolving states of mind are counterpointed against one another and against the shifting hypertextual structure of the poetry. The poem focuses on two immigrants from Eastern Europe, a father and daughter, who are seeing each other again for the first time in many years. The natural world around them becomes a third character, the Mothering Earth. The hypertext unfolds organically from the reader’s choices, with each different reading emphasizing different aspects of the relationship. Many pages in the work contain variable text, which changes whenever the reader rereads that page. The changeability of the text reflects the constant flux of the relationships explored in the poem. “Dispossession” follows a man who is leaving his Caribbean homeland for America. The uncertainty of the future is represented by the changeable structure, which places recurring images in contrasting contexts.

A Study in Shades (Cortland Review, 2000; also available on BBC Online) is a much simpler hypertext poem. It explores the devastation of Alzheimer’s Disease from the points of view of a man afflicted by it and his daughter. The reader interacts with the poem to experience the different perspectives of the two characters and their relationship to each other. An interplay between text and morphing graphics reflects the progress of this relationship.

For more electronic poems as well as essays and articles about electronic literature, visit my home page. You can contact me at kendall@wordcircuits.com.