Do you long when you click?
Preserving William Dickey's HyperCard Poems with Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum
Do you long when you click?
It is no mistake that the cursor is a hand, primed for touch, tremors and trembling.
Before the world wide web was the world wide web, before hyperlinks became second nature, there was HyperCard, a flat-file database with a visual interface, one of the first “hypermedia” software by Apple. It was launched in 1987 and created by the late Bill Atkinson, who sadly passed last week.
My guest for this episode is Matthew Kirschenbaum, professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, who restored the wonderful digital poetry of William Dickey, made with Hypercard.
Dickey, a Yale Younger Poets winner and a respected figure in 20th-century American poetry, had ventured late in his career (his sixties) into these early digital terrains. His hypercards were abstract, exploratory, and demanded an active, almost intimate engagement from the reader. Links were often unmarked, transitions hidden, requiring readers to linger, search, and, at times, hesitate, in a rhythm of interaction that mirrored poetic meter itself, or as was astutely noted in the conversation, even echoed the uncertain rituals of homosexual cruising in its tactile search for the next point of contact.
The HyperCard interface allowed Dickey to reimagine the poetic page as a kind of proto-screen, extending a long lineage of poets who blurred the boundaries between word and image, from Mallarmé’s typographic experiments to Apollinaire’s calligrams.
In the interview, we talk about the challenges of preservation and archival of software specific artworks, the loss that occurs with emulation, the poetry of Dickey, the digital as a site for queerness.
Hope you enjoy it!