The electronic text, in contrast to the fixed marks of print, exists as a process rather than a product. Temporality is woven into the fabric of its materiality at every level, from the screen image produced by a constantly moving electron beam, to the electronic polarities flickering in the magnetic disk, to the light flashing through optic cables. Poetry has traditionally explored the possibilities and limitations of the medium in which it is instantiated; there is, as ** has remarked, "no art without resistance in the materials." Electronic poetry has especially charged reasons, then, to explore the temporalities of its production. This essay explores the construction of temporality in works by two of the most distinguished practitioners of poetry in networked and programmable media, Stephanie Strickland and John Cayley.
In "errand upon which we came," Strickland in collaboration with M. D. Coverley has created a Flash poem that mingles computer-enacted animation sequences with the reader's interventions to control the flow and pacing of the poem. The tension between these two modes of reading is also thematized within the poem, figuring reading as a way of experiencing and participating in the temporal flows of the world. Cayley's "riverisland" is a poetic performance of what he calls "transliteration," a mode of writing and reading that integrates the computer generation of letter forms with the temporal instabilities of electronic polarities that threaten to swamp messages with noise even as they are also the creative froth from which meaning emerges. These two works illustrate how the specificities of electronic environments can serve as resources to incorporate time at a deep level into the processes of poetic significations.