by Craig Epplin

Books begin and end; their physical architecture makes this clear. Hardcovers have wall-like exteriors, and even the covers of paperback volumes tend to be of a color and texture different from the pages within. Like a fence around a pasture or the applause that delineates a performance, the binding tells us when to start and when to stop.

Everyone knows the internet isn’t like that. And as we spend more and more of our time reading on the web, we become all the more accustomed to reading without signposts or double bar lines. The internet, writes Lawrence Lessig, “is not a novel or a symphony. No one authored a beginning, middle, and an end.” This characteristic of the web yields its particular temporality. I pick up books and put them down, sometime over the course of months, but those months make up a sort of unit: the period in my life when I was reading Moby Dick, for example. There is no similar stretch of time called “when I was reading the internet,” unless you count the years between fifth grade up to now as such a unit, which sounds absurd to me.

That comparison is perhaps not fair. After all the internet is not one thing. It has relatively discrete zones: individual sites and genres with their own rules and, yes, their own boundaries. But the point is that those boundaries are always semi-permeable. You can almost always add a link, and that underlined, differently colored fragment of text means there’s a decision to be made: to follow it or not, knowing full well that it might be a rabbit hole from which there’s no return.

For years now, hypertext authors have been exploiting this moment of decision. Readers have to choose, in hypertext literature, where the story or poem goes next. There’s a parallel here with the nature of the internet in general, but it only extends so far. This is because behind the hopscotch structure of most hypertext literature lies an author, usually just one, who has mapped out the possibilities beforehand. Multiplicity is an effect of the finished work, not of the process of its construction.

This is why the projects gathered on Sidebrow’s site are so intriguing to me. Mostly prose poems, they capture, indeed, the moment of decision associated with all linked reading, but they render that decision all the more meaningful, for following any one link means leaving one author’s territory and moving into another’s.

For example, Cathi Murphy’s “The Man Who Ate Breakfast for Dinner” is a piece about a man who likes to walk around barefoot, an ex-user who also likes to sit barefoot in a chair on the lawn, where he prepares for something to begin. The short text has a round, finished quality: it begins with a reference to Einstein and loops back around to him toward the end. This quality, however, is undermined by the seven links scattered throughout its extension, which cut through its appearance of autonomous self enclosure.

Those links are associative. They take us to other poems published on the sprawling Sidebrow site. We don’t have to guess at what associations are being conjured up: when a bit of text links to another poem, a passage in the latter is highlighted in yellow. Thus the phrase “Wet toast on the windowsill” sends us to an excerpt from a poem by Paul Hardacre called “The River Is Far Behind Us,” in which the fragment “rain eating toast / at the window /” is highlighted.

This practice is common throughout the site, and it is reflected in the submissions guidelines, where we read that “[s]ubmissions that reimagine, depart from, or explore the interstices between posted and published pieces are highly encouraged.” This is, on the one hand, nothing new, for nearly all poetry seeks to establish some sort of conversation with the aesthetic tradition. But on the other, it represents a unique departure, in that the project makes this conversation explicit.

All this allows us to see just how tangential and associative the historical conversation within the arts really is. Many of the links lead us to small phrases evocative of the original text. The example I mention above about wet toast and hungry rain is a case in point. However, this only represents the beginning of the reader’s task. What remains is to figure out, or at least imagine, what lies behind these connections. It’s as if the site’s authors had done the hard part for us—underlining little points of contact between one text and another—only to reveal that an even harder task lies in wait ahead: the task of creating some sort of meaning out of those points of contact, which in turn implies following more links and more contingent associations. This is an arduous possibility, for it means that the conversation in which we are engaged is potentially endless.

The rabbit hole, in other words, is home to lots more than just rabbits.

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