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V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una
Prize-winning poet and hypertext pioneer Stephanie Strickland pushes the boundaries of the printed word to create a completely original poetic experience. "V" is an invertible volume with two beginnings. Turning the volume from WaveSon.nets to Losing L'una and back again, over and over, creates a fluidity that extends to the poems themselves: words slip and pour across numbers that have their own lives. In the undulant fold at the book's open center one jumps, via a Web site pointer, to "V"'s third section, which will exist in electronic space at www.Vniverse.com. "V"'s muse is Simone Weil, and in this new book Strickland's elegy for Weil is widened to include a long line of known and conjured women. An extraordinary work that is meant to be glimpsed and scanned and begun again, "V" pulses with many orders of knowledge, organization, and rhythm.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 3, 2024
The structural innovation in this book lost me and the online section was so frustrating to navigate that I gave up. I was hoping the risks taken here would translate into brilliance, but instead I felt dropped into a murky swamp with no clear path in or out.
June 29, 2019
I despise this book. (And I'm glad that the website, vniverse.com, runs on shockwave and is basically defunct). The poems are experimental bullshit.
Losing L'una consists of 18 poems that are broken into smaller sections. I guess the numbers have some relation to the outdated website? Some stanzas are thought-provoking, especially some that are deceptively simple: "It is easier/for us to feel pity/mixed with horror/&repulsion" (p. 23-24 "Simone Demystifies Mercy").
WaveSon.nets has 47 "sonnets." I get鈥攁nd grudgingly accept鈥攖hat there are modernist poets who call any poem with fourteen lines a sonnet...but these "son.nets" are devoid of rhyme scheme and meter and they have fifteen lines. Additionally, the son.nets bleed into one another; often one will "end" mid-sentence or with a comma, then the narrative continues over the next few poems. It is difficult to make sense of them. Recurring themes include: Simone Weil and her beliefs, tarot cards, Plato, God, the zodiac, ancient art, witchcraft, algebra and physics, and the female reproductive system.
Although "difficult" literature isn't my favourite thing in the world, I don't mind it from time to time (and, for what it's worth, my minor in English shows that I'm probably capable of understanding it). But throwing a bunch of esoteric subjects and weird formatting together isn't a great recipe for a poem. This book is 100% self-indulgent crap. I guess Strickland wants to be credited for being so original.
If only I had found the advice in "Errand Upon Which We Came" sooner:
Just for fun, here's an example of the formatting which is supposed to be experimental, but ends up being pathetic and weird:
I hope to never again read a poem in which I'm supposed to take a smiley face seriously.
Poems that I liked:
0/65 = 0% (!!!)
This book is offensively bad. Like, going-to-the-recycling-bin-instead-of-the-thrift-store bad.
Losing L'una consists of 18 poems that are broken into smaller sections. I guess the numbers have some relation to the outdated website? Some stanzas are thought-provoking, especially some that are deceptively simple: "It is easier/for us to feel pity/mixed with horror/&repulsion" (p. 23-24 "Simone Demystifies Mercy").
WaveSon.nets has 47 "sonnets." I get鈥攁nd grudgingly accept鈥攖hat there are modernist poets who call any poem with fourteen lines a sonnet...but these "son.nets" are devoid of rhyme scheme and meter and they have fifteen lines. Additionally, the son.nets bleed into one another; often one will "end" mid-sentence or with a comma, then the narrative continues over the next few poems. It is difficult to make sense of them. Recurring themes include: Simone Weil and her beliefs, tarot cards, Plato, God, the zodiac, ancient art, witchcraft, algebra and physics, and the female reproductive system.
Although "difficult" literature isn't my favourite thing in the world, I don't mind it from time to time (and, for what it's worth, my minor in English shows that I'm probably capable of understanding it). But throwing a bunch of esoteric subjects and weird formatting together isn't a great recipe for a poem. This book is 100% self-indulgent crap. I guess Strickland wants to be credited for being so original.
If only I had found the advice in "Errand Upon Which We Came" sooner:
If only I had closed the book and skipped every part of it. I get that the stanzas are meant to be interchangeable and that you could create hundreds of thousands of poems from these bits and pieces...but is it really that smart? If a stanza can be paired with any other stanza, how vague and pointless does it have to be? If the now-defunct website had a way of randomly generating poems from this text, I could see it being entertaining for a few hours. But I'm not gonna flip back and forth through this mess to try to find something brilliant.
听听听7.113
Gentle Reader, begin anywhere. Skip anything. This text
is framed
fully for the purposes of skipping. Of course,
听听听7.114
it can
be read straight through, but this is not a better reading,
not a better life. You are being asked
听听听7.115
to move with great
rapidity. As if it weren't there. As if you were a frog,
a frog that since it's disappearing
听听听7.116
thinks to ask,
for the first time, in which element it really does
belong. Leaping progress
听听听7.117
will consist
in considering this and closing the book. Anything
else will represent a settled course.
(p.34 "Errand Upon Which We Came")
Just for fun, here's an example of the formatting which is supposed to be experimental, but ends up being pathetic and weird:
a double
positive is
not
a negative. "Yeah,
yeah."
鈽篋别别辫
rule(s), par-t[ur]i-tion.
The delicacy
of fractal curves, point jumping
in the phase space"
(p. 43 "WaveSon.net 43)
I hope to never again read a poem in which I'm supposed to take a smiley face seriously.
Poems that I liked:
0/65 = 0% (!!!)
This book is offensively bad. Like, going-to-the-recycling-bin-instead-of-the-thrift-store bad.
November 28, 2007
I'm a sucker for a bold experiment. The places where V falls short on poetic excellence are the same places where it's gonzo on structural brilliance, so I'm sort of fine with the few sloppy connections and moments of signposting. And I highly recommend checking out . The poems are written to be read in any order -- the reader can jump from any line to any other and still make meaning -- and it's stuffed with all sorts of theory-geek candy. Guaranteed to be featured in women's studies and cultural theory dissertations for the next decade.
June 5, 2011
I really loved this book, but I hated the online version. As an electronic poem, I just thought it must have been too quickly outdated. The text is so lovely and surprising, I was sad to miss really being able to read it via the online incarnation.
October 18, 2012
I remain unconvinced that Stephanie Strickland is not a magical cyborg created to kick poetry's everloving ass.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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