Polymorphic Reading in Strickland and Jaramillo’s slippingglimpse

This essay explores the different modalities of reading in Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo’s slippingglimpse (2007). It responds to the challenge of analyzing poems that behave like events. slippingglimpse is a collaborative, kinetic and generative digital poem composed of text and moving image that “reads” and departs from multiple sources. One of these is Paul Ryan’s videos of wave patterns, also known as chreods, to which words and phrases are mapped, rotating and scaling as they move. Complementarily, source texts act as thematic threads, but also as corpora that Strickland appropriates. The reading processes and modes involved in the poem’s output are complicated by a feedback loop introduced by the authors: “water reads text, text reads technology, technology reads water, coming full circle.” This polymorphism is accentuated when read alongside the textual sources and themes, some of which are here discussed at the level of cycle, capture, self-reflexive vocabulary, environment and fabric, with the source story of “the torture of the flax” acting as an allegory for women’s oppression. In sum, this essay reads slippingglimpse’s various elements: interface, source code, text displayed onscreen, spatial and temporal dimensions. This approach is accompanied by an experiment undertaken during the reading process: a fast forward modifying deformance. By modifying the temporality of the poem’s presentation, this essay adds another reading method for analyzing kinetic text behavior.

Keywords: Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Paul Ryan, slippingglimpse, Digital Poetry, American Poetry, Ecopoetry, Polymorphic Reading