Hymns of the Drowning Swimmer

On a trip to Ballarat, driving through the rural areas surrounding the town, I came across an crumbling church that now housed a make-shift antique store. At the bottom of a dusty book stack was a hymnal, with an inscription to a woman whose son had recently drowned. I was taken with the way water had become the music of the land in this area, how it defined so much of their lives and deaths. This digital poem creates a series of interactive poetic hymns, in part to this drowned son, and in part to the region and its own “drowning in drought”.

An anthology of poems. Originally this was going to be three different works. Not able to finish those, I fitted them all together in ‘selected works’ mode. Many of the interactive devices are borrowed from other works and the texts culled from experiments gone awry. Hymns came from my thumbing through Methodist hymnals and finding the collection varied and alluringly hypnotic, not in a religious way, but rather in a ‘these people are struggling to drown’ way. I love the title.

Awards/Publications: Reviewed Extensively (for example “Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines” by Manuel Portela), published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac Special edition on New Media Poetry, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).