Mark Amerika's piece Grammatron got me thinking of other uses hyperlink in text I've seen. Most notable is some of the work my one of my creative writing professors, Ander Monson, who apparently in his former life was a hacker but now is an essayist/fiction-writer/poet dude.
One of Ander's preferred ideas is that of the labyrinth, which he applies to his work in various ways. One of his volumes of poetry, The Available World has a companion site , which, like Amerika's piece, uses hyperlinks to create a webby, non-linear literary experience (though I'd contest the classification of Grammatron as literary). Monson's site can be read alone, but it is best experienced as a companion to the physical volume. The website includes some poems that are in the book, and some that aren't.
What I can make from Monson's interest in pairing web and page (which he does with another book, an essay collection, in a different format) is something about non-linearity. I'm still going through it in my head. When you read a book, it's like following a thread. You know that you will see everything the thread sees; even if it doesn't tell you everything, you'll know you read everything it had to say. But a website is different. Part of the fun, and the stress, of reading on the web is the constant need to (literally and figuratively) keep tabs on everything. What are you missing? Where did you start and where did you end? Did you find what you were looking for or forget about it completely?
So what does Monson want to do by offering us both? I'd probably have to read The Available World a couple more times. As I mentioned in my first post, with poetry form has got interact with content, and I'm still absorbing the poems themselves. But I like the interactivity of his website; the responsibility, you might say, that it puts on the reader to be explore the labyrinth; to make their own adventure.
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