“The Dreamlife of Letters” is a digital poem by Brian Kim Stefans, created from words that were written to him by a colleague during a roundtable collaboration (http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/stefans__the_dreamlife_of_letters/dreamlife_index.html).  He took her words, alphabetized them, and created a short series of poems based off of her words.  The words of this poem move in various directions upon the screen.  They appear in response to another word or letter many times, but at other times they seem at odds with the rest of the words, and only have the first letter in common, rather than the first few letters, or patterns of letters within the word.

     This text was interesting to me, because the author specifically states that it is not interactive.  On many levels, it is not.  However, after studying Hayles’s arguments about print and code recently, I am able to see elements of the poem that I could interact with.  There is a version of the poem which the reader can view as plain text.  However, “The Dream Life of Letters” as a digital work relies upon the code behind the poem.  The author explains it as more of a movie, rather than a poem; if you do not view the plain text, the only way you can view the whole poem is to sit through it for about 11 minutes as the words play in front of you.  At some points, the actions of the letters correspond with the word; for example, the word height expands and grows taller at first, then shrinks away, while the word “drip” appears as the letter D falls down the screen.  While the author states that the straight-through playing out of the text makes it non-interactive, a practiced reader of digital media may be able to undermine this assertion.  The code that the author created for the work could be seen and the idea replicated, with a different source for the words which it includes, or the original text could be altered; someone could chose to have it go in reverse alphabetical order instead.  While the author does intend for his text to be seen, rather than manipulated, reading Hayles’s works have made me register more of the underlying elements of digital literature, rather than simply what I see on the screen.