It has been 10 years since FEED magazine, among the first and most influential online publications specifically devoted to culture in the digital age, shut itself down.[1] (The magazine’s editors recently reposted the magazine’s archive.)[2] This decennial provides a good context for the following discussion, which considers the problem of how hypertext poems composed in the late 1990s (roughly, the period of FEED’s activity) have aged relative to their counterparts in traditional print. Two issues are of particular interest to me here. First, I will consider why the poem in hypertext, a digital medium initially trumpeted for its novelty and malleability, appears to age so much more rapidly than its cousins in print; Stephanie Strickland will offer the primary examples. Second, I suggest that the hypertext poem’s visible submission to time is not a mark of its technological failure but rather the technology’s accentuation of the lyric poem’s inherent ephemerality. The essay addresses these issues in turn, beginning with an archetypal formulation of the problem, namely, Dino Buzzati’s delightfully idiosyncratic retelling of the Orpheus myth.

On its surface, at least, this pairing of genre (poetry) and hermeneutic frame (time) is intuitive, if not altogether conventional. At least since Empedocles wrote poetic lines declaring the universality of change—“All things doth nature change, enwrapping souls / in unfamiliar tunics of flesh”—verse, whose name in English already conveys the “turning” of that change, has assumed time as its measure and, often explicitly, its subject.[3] For some poets, the poem’s rhythmic movement reminds us that we must act fast, before these “tunics of flesh” have lost their appeal, as when Robert Herrick exhorts the virgins to “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old time is still a-flying.” Others, beginning as far back as Xenophanes in the sixth century BC, regard the poem as a kind of mainstay against the ephemerality that would be declared by other philosopher-poets, at least insofar as the fame sung in verse will “never cease / so long as a Greek sort of song shall be.”[4] Of course, these two orientations of the poem in time—the first a declaration of time’s mercilessness, the second a defense against same—hardly exclude one another; Horace, for example, has given us lasting specimens of both.[5]

Yet any poem, as a language technology—“a small (or large) machine made of words,” as William Carlos Williams famously puts it—is inevitably subject to technological obsolescence as regards both its compositional (language) and distributional media (print, hypertext, loudspeaker, etc.).[6] The aforementioned verses illustrate this point perfectly: Language becomes antiquated (as in Herrick’s seventeenth-century idiom) or antique (Xenophanes’ Greek, Horace’s Latin), while the full text of the poem may be lost with the disintegration of the material upon which it had been written. The hypertext poem answers this challenge by slipping free of the materiality of print media and conveying itself instead within cyberspace, which none of us can hold, but which anyone with Internet access can see by opening the right kind of “window.”