Photog by Peter Vidani
Made for Tumblr
My Name Is Captain, Captain. My Name Is Captain, Captain., is a collaborative night-flight poem, a hyper-elegy structured around a central metaphor of dead reckoning navigation. This work is currently available on cd from the publisher, Eastgate Systems. A review and interview can be read at the Iowa Review Web. Since its release My Name Is Captain, Captain. has been incorporated into several university syllabi within literature, creative writing and experimental programming departments. Review By, Robert Coover, Author of Pricksongs & Descants Using verbal and visual metaphors from the early days of flight in the hypermedia skies of these early days of electronic literature, My Name Is Captain, Captain. is already, even at the moment it is being published, a classic in its form. Dead reckoning, the metaphor from early flight around which the poem is structured, is a way of knowing where you are while in motion and in effect flying blind, based not on what you can see but on what you have done and what wind and weather may have done to you since you last knew where you were, tactics useful to the reader in negotiating this elegant, densely complex, night-flight poem. At times playful, at times somber, My Name Is Captain, Captain. is, at all points of the compass, a compelling and intriguing read. Review By, Lance Olsen, Author of Tonguing the Zeitgeist My Name is Captain, Captain is a hyper-elegy exploring the poetics of instability, uncertainty, and complexity. While the ghostly outlines of a plot about the anniversary of a woman’s death gradually emerge, the reader is never provided with enough context to give the woman or the events surrounding her dying narrative or emotional flesh. Instead, the real protagonist of this piece turns out to be its own processes: the beautifully designed interplay between elusive language and the motion of ever-morphing surfaces. Morrissey and Talley take their guiding verbal and visual metaphors from aviation, and it soon becomes apparent that the reader is flying blind among a welter of graphics suggesting flight, scrolling blocks of Morse code, floating strands of numbers, and screens on which poem shards incrementally accrue, sometimes word by word, sometimes line by line (alternately lyrical, metalogical, and goofy), sometimes from upper left to lower right, sometimes backward, sometimes seemingly randomly across the electronic page, sometimes slowly, and often (especially early in the reading process) with such velocity that it is simply impossible to keep up with them before they either crumble into unreadable alphabet heaps or are overwritten palimpsest-like with other lines. Language and meaning accordingly become flirts, acts of unfulfilled desire, as one unsatisfactory phantom-interpretation scatters into others. The impression the reader is left with is one of cool, intricate abstraction a cerebral experience analogous to listening to a piece of highly experimental music, only with your eyes. With My Name is Captain, Captain, we approach a limit-situation in the growth of hypermedia, an extremely self-conscious possibility space that is simultaneously stunning, engaging, and packed with promise for this still-embryonic (heck, it’s really fewer than a dozen years old, after all) genre. Review By, Bobby Rabyd, Author of Sunshine ‘69 “You don’t need to know Morse code to enjoy the genius in this triumph of literary design. With their flirtatious interface, Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley have built more than a poem — they’ve built a pioneering poetics based on animation, recombination, and exploration. Messages read like broken radio communications of early women aviationists. Language harmonizes literary forebears Gertrude Stein and Keith Waldrop with their estranged heirs’ electroacoustic music and Chicago math rock. Sound (it’s all in your head) supplies the coordinates for lost flights. My Name is Captain, Captain. might make dit dah dit dah a household word.”

My Name Is Captain, Captain.

My Name Is Captain, Captain., is a collaborative night-flight poem, a hyper-elegy structured around a central metaphor of dead reckoning navigation. This work is currently available on cd from the publisher, Eastgate Systems. A review and interview can be read at the Iowa Review Web.

Since its release My Name Is Captain, Captain. has been incorporated into several university syllabi within literature, creative writing and experimental programming departments.

Review
By, Robert Coover, Author of Pricksongs & Descants

Using verbal and visual metaphors from the early days of flight in the hypermedia skies of these early days of electronic literature, My Name Is Captain, Captain. is already, even at the moment it is being published, a classic in its form. Dead reckoning, the metaphor from early flight around which the poem is structured, is a way of knowing where you are while in motion and in effect flying blind, based not on what you can see but on what you have done and what wind and weather may have done to you since you last knew where you were, tactics useful to the reader in negotiating this elegant, densely complex, night-flight poem. At times playful, at times somber, My Name Is Captain, Captain. is, at all points of the compass, a compelling and intriguing read.

Review
By, Lance Olsen, Author of Tonguing the Zeitgeist

My Name is Captain, Captain is a hyper-elegy exploring the poetics of instability, uncertainty, and complexity. While the ghostly outlines of a plot about the anniversary of a woman’s death gradually emerge, the reader is never provided with enough context to give the woman or the events surrounding her dying narrative or emotional flesh. Instead, the real protagonist of this piece turns out to be its own processes: the beautifully designed interplay between elusive language and the motion of ever-morphing surfaces. Morrissey and Talley take their guiding verbal and visual metaphors from aviation, and it soon becomes apparent that the reader is flying blind among a welter of graphics suggesting flight, scrolling blocks of Morse code, floating strands of numbers, and screens on which poem shards incrementally accrue, sometimes word by word, sometimes line by line (alternately lyrical, metalogical, and goofy), sometimes from upper left to lower right, sometimes backward, sometimes seemingly randomly across the electronic page, sometimes slowly, and often (especially early in the reading process) with such velocity that it is simply impossible to keep up with them before they either crumble into unreadable alphabet heaps or are overwritten palimpsest-like with other lines. Language and meaning accordingly become flirts, acts of unfulfilled desire, as one unsatisfactory phantom-interpretation scatters into others. The impression the reader is left with is one of cool, intricate abstraction a cerebral experience analogous to listening to a piece of highly experimental music, only with your eyes. With My Name is Captain, Captain, we approach a limit-situation in the growth of hypermedia, an extremely self-conscious possibility space that is simultaneously stunning, engaging, and packed with promise for this still-embryonic (heck, it’s really fewer than a dozen years old, after all) genre.

Review
By, Bobby Rabyd, Author of Sunshine ‘69

“You don’t need to know Morse code to enjoy the genius in this triumph of literary design. With their flirtatious interface, Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley have built more than a poem — they’ve built a pioneering poetics based on animation, recombination, and exploration. Messages read like broken radio communications of early women aviationists. Language harmonizes literary forebears Gertrude Stein and Keith Waldrop with their estranged heirs’ electroacoustic music and Chicago math rock. Sound (it’s all in your head) supplies the coordinates for lost flights. My Name is Captain, Captain. might make dit dah dit dah a household word.”