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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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True North
Reviewed by Rachel Barenblat
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The first screen of True North, a poetic hypertext by Stephanie Strickland, says the following: "True North // Or // The LI-La-Di World // (Level Interaction, Lattice Dislocation)." The acronym LI-La-Di is never explained anywhere else; it's referred to once, and then it's dropped. "Level Interaction, Lattice Dislocation" is an interesting idea, but I can't quite put a finger on what it means. If you're short on time, that's my nutshell review of True North. It's interesting, but I can't quite put a finger on what it means. True North comes packaged with a manual, which contains instructions for how to find links, how to jump around, how to decipher the icons at the bottom of the screen, what to do with the confusing map that looks like a series of boxes connected by the lines of a fractal screen-saver. |
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But I am resistant to reading this with a manual clutched in one hand. I was taught a long time ago that one can't learn with a book in one fist, that one must learn by doing, and I want to learn this by doing, too. So I muddle through for a while without the manual. Unfortunately, the hypertext never comes to make intuitive sense to me. After a while I pick up the manual and try to use it to help me navigate, but even with the manual I find I am at the mercy of the computer and where it wants to take me. I am not driving this car.
The first poem I came to began, "I wanted a Guneaform – a woman's form-of writing." I held down two keys to find where the links are, as instructed, and a box showed me that "woman's form" is a link. When I clicked on it, I got two choices: Emily Dickinson and Weather. I picked Dickinson and found a whole new poem.
In the second (Dickinson-influenced) poem, the linked phrase "wizard wise woman" gave me a choice between a Biblical citation and the Funk and Wagnall's definition. I picked the Bible. I went from there.
The leaps of links were interesting for a while, until I realized I hadn't actually finished a single poem; I'd started several and become sidetracked. And I couldn't figure out how to go back and read the poems I'd already encountered. This is my frustration: True-North-the-hypertext is interesting, but navigating it is so confusing that I didn't get very far. Perhaps the lack of orientation is part of the point: this is, after all, a book (at least in part) about direction.
Strickland's writing style strikes me as a cross between the rich, resonant imagery of poet Lucie Brock-Broido and the postmodern analysis of scholar Helene Cixous. It is clear that Strickland is obsessed with space, with maps, with femininity, with language, with direction – all of which might explain her attraction to the hypertext form, which maps itself as one reads it but has no hierarchical structure, no necessary table of contents, no right or wrong way to go.
True North takes ideas from the French feminist school of thought – as exemplified by something like Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, which seeks to explain the difference between man's inherent need for structure and woman's inherent slipperiness, how woman doesn't fit into masculine boxes, how woman doesn't think in terms of boxes at all – and makes them real. This hypertext doesn't fit into boxes. Perhaps that makes it feminine. Certainly that makes it postmodern. Unfortunately, for me, that also makes it confusing.
Embarrassing as this is to admit, I find the experience of reading True North unnerving. As a writer of poetry I want the poetry to be paramount; I want to sit down and read these poems, one after the other, on paper I can feel.
As an Internet afficionado, though, I want to like the hypertext form. And there are things I like about it. I like its unpredictability. I like the way it allows the writer to link disparate elements together. I'm not a neo-Luddite; I don't dislike the hypertext form itself.
I think what's hard for me is that, in this case, the writing isn't paramount. The form, the way the words link together, the associations between them - those things are more important than what the words actually say. The connections are more important than what they connect. As an Internet fan, I like the idea of this new art form. As a poet, I still want my old-fashioned words in old-fashioned order.
