Title: A Tree with Managers and Jittery Boats
Detail: Multi-level navigation menus create multi-linear poems.
Multi-level menus as poetry generator, for when lines branch and branch. ….
When writing a poem, often any line could generate out new directions, intersecting poems, branching possibilities. Using the modified code of a menu-sub-menu, I am experimenting with a poem within a poem within a poem. Enjambent as menu as poetic turn. A few factors I’m playing with: 1. the menu fade away timing (more or less?) 2. the mixing of various level depths 3. only one first entry, that extends to dozens of depths? 4. how else might this be used? 5. Rollover or On Press to trigger?
I plan to continue with this work, plotting more complex poetic interactions between lines and nodes. Additionally, it might be interesting to interlink two or more deep menu poems. Of course this form of non-linearity is so complex that reading must become an entirely exploratory and focus-intensive activity. Will this swing in the age of quick and easy?
Branch/Branch Digital Poem (http://www.netpoetic.com/experiments/npoem4.html)
A fancy way/method for branching, poetic lines out of lines, extending the poem down and out, read through node or nodeless. The poetic notion is more than simple. Write a poem, perhaps ten lines long. Then explore each of the lines, imagine poems which might build from them. Your poem might now have three branches extending from the trunk. Now choose lines from the branches and extend those, trees on trees. Geometry is both important and not important. Such meaningless statements are designed to coax vague thoughts an academic wonder. Are you now an academic wonder? You are. You are. Just because I am silly doesn’t mean I’m not entirely serious. Whatever that means.
Once you have your branching poem, condense it more, in terms of visibility. Only the first line of the first trunk will be visible on user/reader arrival. As with most of my other net poems, you should abandon any thought that you can control how the user will click, which lines will expand, what lines will leave the screen. Stop being such a controlling monster, your bone claws like apples with wasps, really angry and large wasps. Damn anglo-saxons.
