For those who haven’t heard, I’m headed to Alaska later this week by boat (er, um, a cruise) and since we dock in Vancouver, BC for a day we need to bring our passports. Since I haven’t been able to find mine, I set out to find it and that required going through every shelf, box and drawer. While leafing through hanging file folders, I stumbled on some old writings and was more than geek ecstatic when I found my first interactive poem from high school.
Ecstatic not because it’s great, but because of the memories. I was going to be an interactive artist. I wanted to use the web to make a new kind of art. Hence I shipped myself off to art school instead of mechanical engineering. Without further ado, a non-interactive write-up of an ode to HTML and webpages … including tags that have long since been deprecated.
first, you must
conceive
the idea,
passion, reason,
and watch it swell
comes commencement
the <HEAD>
is the first to pop
out, followed by the bare <BODY>,
but chance she will chill,
you must dress
her in headings <H1> to <H6>
and fancy fonts <FONT FACE>
colors, <BGCOLOR>,
and pictures,
<IMG SRC…>
and our children forever changing,
you mustn’t forget
your web page needs no neglect —
check in on her from time to time,
adorn her with changes she needs,
attend to yourself
in this age of technology.
In college, I took a poetry class and decided to share this ‘oldie’ with the group to which I received some interesting feedback including this one which made me laugh. From 1999:
“This makes me think about all those abandoned (out-of-date) web pages out there … like ORPHANS. Lord.”
There were abandoned pages in 1999? If only I could go back in time and show them the state of the web today. Lord.
Extra: Today is Day 19/20, Post 17 of my 30 day blog challenge. Click ‘Follow’ at the bottom of the page to receive weekly updates in your inbox or follow me on Tumblr if that’s your scene.
