Un Coup de dés as "Inextrinsic"
This page is about one of the most ground-breaking poems ever written. It is especially relevant to digital poetry, almost prefiguring it.
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard by Mallarmé (who appears quite a bit on this site) was composed in 1897. It is written across 11 double pages and deploys 13 different typefaces. You can read more about the graphic elements in this article.
I came to digital poetry in the first place through this poem because it occurred to me as the Net got going in the mid-1990s that it was highly suited to computing. With a colleague at the time, Jason Whittaker, I made a CD-Rom of a digital version, which was published in 2000 by Legenda, the imprint of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford. See here
Un coup de dés ... as inextrinsic
This page is about one of the most ground-breaking poems ever written. The poem is especially relevant to digital poetry, almost prefiguring it.
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard by Mallarmé (who appears quite a bit on this site) was composed in 1897. It is written across 11 double pages and deploys 13 different typefaces. The title, broken down, runs through the work as a major typographic element in the largest type. The original is also black type on white pages; but one of the poem's principal metaphors is the constellation, and the poet remarked that the 'alphabet of the stars' is written in white on black - 'des astres' (the stars) puns on 'désastre' (disaster) - so the digital version allows you to change the colour of the background of either side, or both sides, of the screen-page. You can read more about the graphic elements in this article.
I came to digital poetry in the first place through this poem because it occurred to me as the Net got going in the mid-1990s that it was highly suited to computing. With a colleague at the time, Jason Whittaker, I made a CD-Rom of a digital version, which was published in 2000 by Legenda, the imprint of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford. See here
The image above is the opening page of the digital version, laid out approximately as it is in the original, but white on black. No attempt has been made to represent the page or the gutter (the central margins where the book folds): a difficult decision because of the poem's metaphors of the book and the fold.
The same page as above with the Readers running. The blue and yellow Readers are programmed in English, but with different aims in mind. The human reader, you, can decide which to follow, or to adopt a scanning approach to reading. It's best to take time over several interactions.
