Loving e-poetry

Do you ♥ e-poetry? Leonardo Flores certainly does. Flores, an associate professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, is the driving force behind the I ♥ E-Poetry project, an online scholarly compendium of electronic poetry. E-poetry is part of a growing genre of creative writing known as "electronic literature" or "e-lit." According to the Electronic Literature Organization, e-lit includes literary texts that embrace the affordances of computing or networked technologies in their composition. Examples include hypertext fiction, poetry bots, and literature composed collaboratively online.

Flores launched I ♥ E-Poetry in 2011, with the goal of reading an e-poem every day and writing a 100-word response. He envisioned the project as an annotated bibliography of e-lit and hoped it might convey the poetic possibilities of the genre. Notably, the vision of the project is global in scope, invested in e-lit from around the world, in any language. Between 2011 and 2013, I ♥ E-Poetry ran 500 consecutive, daily entries for its first phase. Now, the project has an advisory board, collaborators, and seeks contributors. The project not only catalogs e-lit but also makes a major contribution to the scholarly apparatus for talking about it. Designed with a non-specialist audience in mind, the project gives visitors a glimpse into the texts, genres, and language of e-poetry. Take a look - you might ♥ e-poetry too.