Punchlines

punchlines is a lyric long poem that probes the poetic tensions in the everyday languages of computer-user collaboration. Within the narrative structure of a Canadian couple’s drive down the West Coast of the United States, the poems set this exploration between the call (poem title) and response (the poem itself) of jokes and punchlines, echoing the input-output (call/response) of modern computer-user cooperation, with the ultimate goal of infusing code with poetry and poetry with code. The first section is the initial trip down the coast while the second section houses poems in response to the return trip. There is little stopping in this long poem: the poems are told while driving or while in intermediary places like hotels and restaurants, and are deliberately full of jerky and fast hyperlinking motion.