Introduction To:

Writing Through Time

by Dan Waber

 

This piece is about dimension, about compositional space, about alternatives to the idea of page, about perception of time, about the slipperiness of language, about the way units of time are elastic based on content and context, about the way units of time are fixed arbitrarily, about patience and its lack, about how internet reading tends toward superficiality and an attempt to defeat that tendency, about the patterns we see and miss.

Last year it appeared on the Wryting-L list, one word at a time, over the course of one hundred and sixty-seven consequetive days beginning on June 9th. Quite a few sprawling threads were generated as a result of these one-word postings. I'm not sure why, really, it was almost as if, for a group of writers, one word all alone was an irritant and more words needed to be poured around in to soothe the itch. A day of pause between each word has an effect, this much is true.

Recently I've been doing some work involving poetry in more than the two dimensions of print, simulated z-axis, sound poetry, and playing around with the way that time can dance with space to create more meanings in smaller bursts. It was this last which gave me the toolset to re-fashion this poem in the way you see it here.

Bio: Dan Waber is a visual poet, concrete poet, sound poet, performance poet, publisher, editor, playwright and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in all sorts of delicious places, from digital to print, from stage to classroom, from mailboxes to puppet theaters. He is currently working on “and everywhere in between”. He makes his online home at logolalia.com.