To continue the trend of three-letter publications presenting reviews of #!, ebr (Electronic Book Review) has just published a review by John Cayley – an expert in electronic literature, an accomplished cybertext poet, a teacher of e-lit practices, and someone who has created digital work engaging with the writings of Samuel Beckett, among other things.
Steven Wingate’s review of my book #! (pronouonced “Shebang,” Counterpath Press, 2014) appears in the current American Book Review and seems to be the first review in print.
I was very pleased to read it. Wingate discusses how the presentation of code provided a hook for understanding what programs do, much as bilingual editions allow a reader to learn more (at least a bit more) about a different language by skipping back and forth between recto and verso. An important goal of mine was to offer more access to computing and to show that code can be concise and open. I aimed to do this even as I wrore rather obscure and difficult programs, such as the ones in Perl, but certainly when writing Ruby and Python, the languages Wingate finds most pleasing.
Even better, Wingate modified “Through the Park” to create his own elliptical text generator with his own language. Modifying the code that’s there is a close reading of it indeed, just as the reader who memorizes a poem knows it better than someone who looks over it or reads it aloud once. I’m very glad that Wingate got into the programs & poems in #! so deeply and that he wrote this review. I’m sure it will help to open up new perspectives on code and poetry.