Tim McLaughlin

In Tim McLaughlin's kinetic poetry, the reader is more of a watcher, does not make choices about links, does not physically engage herself with the reading. Yet, McLaughlin's works are less awkward and more open than Robert Kendall's "Dispossession", in which the reader navigates through the poem on her own. The movement of the text is paced in such a way that there is a smoothness to it, and the reader's attention is drawn to both the spatiality and temporality of it--where it sits on the screen, how long each line is available, characteristics that make the physical space a bodily space. As Katherine Hayles asserts, in electronic text, physical space is a "visual representation that the reader occupies kinesthetically as well as conceptually." (Hayles, N. Katherine. "Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: Rethinking Signification in New Media." Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Georgia, 29 October 1999.) Thus the reader forms a clear relationship to the text and images as visualized. McLaughlin's works are more intimate than Kendall's "Dispossession" because the movement is not just in the images but in the words themselves, and those are what are so close to human. A person cannot create an image with little to no effort, and would find it very difficult to do so without other materials such as a pencil or computer. Words, on the other hand, can be easily uttered and come merely from the brain and the mouth, but often involve other parts of the body, whether the hands to gesture in emphasis or the eyes that move in thought.

McLaughlin's "poems that read themselves," such as "Birds of Good omen for Sandra" and "Typeface," are in a section of his work entitled "Apocrypha," derived from Greek apokryptein, "to hide away." The term is most used in reference to biblical literature and means works outside an accepted canon of scripture. According to Encyclopedia Brittanica Online, "The history of the term's usage indicates that it referred to a body of esoteric writings that were at first prized, later tolerated, and finally excluded. In its broadest sense apocrypha has come to mean any writings of dubious authority." ("apocrypha" Encyclopćdia Britannica Online. http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=8122&sctn=1 Accessed 10 November 1999].)

New media poetry is very much outside the accepted canon of literary poetry, and McLaughlin's poetry is found on the web, a medium that often only allows one to locate what she is looking for with the correct URL. Performing a search for the keywords "Tim McLaughlin" on Yahoo, in fact only yields a link to HomesByTim.com, a real estate agent's web site, ironically, a space used to sell homes (which are spaces people see as their own) on the internet, a place where space is open and endless, not really belonging to anyone. Yet the government sells domain names to allow people to publish on the internet, a possibly apocryphal act in itself, as they have claimed it as theirs to sell, when it is ownerless. When web space was first discovered, it was considered something that would (and has) transform(ed) our world because of the possibilities it presents for writers and artists to show their work, for people from different cultures to communicate, for information to be easily accessible to all. Since then, the culture of the web has turned largely to e-commerce, infiltrated by advertisements and "shopping carts." Hopefully, this culture will not remain so dominant, encouraging many people to discount the entire idea of the internet altogether.