Brian Kim Stefans, “The Dreamlife of Letters” is a very modernist take on poetry, combining computer generated visual art and poetic verse that is broken into an alphabetic sequence, where each letter takes a stanza. This poem is comprised in a way that may leave readers, as viewers, questioning what they are seeing. Stefans somewhat random display of words and letters joining and disjoining, changing shape color and size, resembles something out of the mid-90s crime-drama Hackers, starring Angelina Jolie. His work gives a playful lifelike energy to letters, giving them what seems like their own freedom of expression in a two-dimensional space. This combination of technology and poesy, which was originally a response to another writer’s poem, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an online community called “roundtable,” unveils a new method of poetry; in which the reader is left as an observer to the a display of letters changing forms, granting entertainment that surpasses the capability of just words on a page.
-Dalton Holcombe, originally published here.
