A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.

To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.

It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.

The rest of the issue is full of interesting work, from Helen Shewolfe Tseng‘s textual simulation of a sonic landscape to s. hickory‘s ‘night train’, a short film-poem conjured through code (and which, bizarrely, contains a line almost identical to one of the ones I cut from ‘The Whisky Shop’!)