You've Been Eaten By a Grue: Choose Your Own Adventure Books and Hypertext

Many of us cut our literary teeth on Choose Your Own Adventure Books. Like hard copy hypertext, these books engendered a love of reading by allowing bright-eyed youngsters to make decisions for themselves as they read through the story. The choices that the reader made could either lead to victory against all odds, or utter defeat and violent fictional death.

As the 1980s wore on, however, the core idea behind these books was picked up by the new video and computer game industry. Begin with text-based adventures like Zork, technology allowed people to create increasingly more interactive environments which eventually far surpassed Choose Your Own Adventure Books in popularity. Today, the plot of video games is often just as important as the graphics and controls.

"Give Me Simple Laboring Folk": Poems About and For Workers

Happy Labor Day, one and all! My forefathers and countless others spent most of each day in places like the one pictured so that I could study something as esoteric as poetry. As a way of honoring their contributions, I'd like to share some poetry written about and for the industrial labor force that built the world on which we now rely.

The quote in this article's title comes from a poem by Thoreau, entitled Conscience. It's part of a short list of "Poems about Work" compiled by PoetSeers.org that includes a number of traditional poems that are worth checking out. Along the same lines, it's worth taking a look at Philip Levine's reflection on poems of work.

For a less canonical approach, there's a great collection of poems celebrating workers by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer entitled Steady Hands: Poems about Work. It draws inspiration from Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" while still maintaining a highly original voice and tone.

I'm most excited about a multimedia poetry project entitled The Peter Principle. This online collection of lyric poems by Jeff Lytle is based on the actual Peter Principle, which states roughly that eventually everyone will wind up doing a job they aren't qualified for.

Most of the poems are written "before or shortly after going to work," as Lytle says, but the project goes beyond exploring work as a theme. By using links and intertextuality to tie his poems to one another in a non-sequential way, Lytle takes to task the notion of a continuous narrative in his work or anyone else's. By providing visualizations and an audio clip of what I assume is the author himself reading the work, he uses all of the Internet's richness to his thematic advantage. You can find Lytle discussing his presentation methods in more depth here.

The site updates once a week with new work poems, and it's worth returning to even as just a reminder of what can be done with poetry in the contemporary technological landscape. That being said, Lytle's exacting verse, as well as the writing of the other poets mentioned in this post, is a meaningful send-up of what is admirable about the legions of people out there who work for a living.

Where Has All the Hypertext Gone?

For starters, some poetry news from over the weekend:

Apparently, former British Prime Minister Sir John Major wrote secret poetry, though why he was keeping it a secret we’ll never know.

In a truly nasty coincidence, Ryan North of the fantastic Dinosaur Comics, postedthis comic after I had already finished my post on webcomics and poetry. Now, on to today’s topic!

Long ago, when the internets began, before they were even a glint in Al Gore’s and/or Ted Stevens’ eye, there was a phenomenon known as Hypertext Poetry. Initially gaining a bit of traction in the poetic community, hypertext poems combined traditional techniques with some very basic hyperlinks, allowing poems to weave in and out of several webpages. Sites like this one and this onemade honest efforts to provide collections of these poems to internet readers.

In the early nineties the movement exploded, with scholars at Brown University, including noted author Robert Coover, beginning to take notice and participate. As you can see on their site, they even began to expand into other forms of virtual poetry.

So what happened? Why do some of the links to poems in the sites above not even work anymore? Why isn’t hypertext a class taught in Lit programs at colleges across the country? Why doesn’t every poem posted on a blog today have dozens of links in it?

The answer is complicated. First of all, as you may notice, hypertext can be a little cumbersome to read. After the initial flair of a new technology wears off, it won’t stay popular unless it’s accessible. Take a read through some of the poems above if you can; it’s a safe bet most of you will find the reading a bit cumbersome, maybe even a little frustrating. Even one of my favorites, a compilation piece entitled “The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks,” gets to be too much after a while.

Even more than that, the form really only got its sea-legs between ‘95 and ‘99, just as online video was becoming truly feasible. This made oral poetry and performance poetry easily communicable, and purely visual online poetry started to seem passe.

The final death knell of hypertext was probably Web 2.0. Wikis, blogs, and other user-driven-content sites allowed virtually anyone to self-publish. The need for controlled hypertext projects passed away with the rise of social networking. Something to think about the next time you post your latest as a “note” on Facebook.

Regardless of whether or not it’s still widely in use, the hypertext poetry movement is one that you should definitely check out if you haven’t already. Who knows? You may even decide to bring it back!