“Moment” by Joe Keenan is a unique piece of generative/interactive software poetry I have visited many times. If I’m not mistaken, “Moment” requires IE for the PC, by the way. I don’t tend to revisit many art works on the Net; many of them are for one or two reads or perusals or visits, or interactions, playings, whatever. And that’s fine. You visit them once, and that’s that. I revisit Joe’s “Moment” for various reasons, the primary one being I still have not seen/read it all; each time I visit it does/says something I haven’t seen. Also, what “Moment” does with text visually is sometimes a wonder to behold, yet neither is it simply ‘text as image’; the text is usually interesting. Joe Keenan is a significant poet as well as programmer and visual guy. Another reason I visit it is to get a sense of the progression of the piece, a sense of it overall as I work my way through both the functionality and the “threads” and “aspects”.

He’s from the Buffalo/New York area. He is unassuming about his poetry; you don’t hear much from him. There are some other visual poetry (non-programmed) works from him at Generator Press; his are the first four. As you see, all of the visuals are made entirely of text, ie, there are no bitmaps or vectors involved in Joe’s visual poetry, typically, as far as I know; it’s all text and color. In this regard he shares the approach of Ted Warnell, whom Joe knows and admires. But they are quite different artists. Joe’s background is first as a poet, I suspect; Ted’s is first as a visual artist; Joe’s text is readable; Ted’s often isn’t; Joe is, I would say, an unacknowledged master of visual poetry combined with strong attention to the word–both the text and the resultant image are of concern to Joe; the text is a concern of Ted’s, but the concept and the visuals typically dominate. In Ted’s work, it’s often interesting to check out the source code; the text is sometimes presented there. Ted sometimes uses bitmaps, and if so, they’re woven into the html and text; but, primarily, the ‘material’ of both Keenan and Warnell is text, html, and javascript.

The programming of “Moment” is in Javascript/DHTML. The programming is available via ‘view source’ if you want to check it out. I haven’t looked at the programming very much at all; what “Moment” does on the monitor is enough to keep you occupied for a year or so without looking at the code, though I just had a look at it now and discovered that it takes keyboard input as well as point and click input from the dropdown menus. It also has a text editing facility that allows you to input your own text. The programming is really well done, and has only stalled my browser once in all the times I’ve visited it over three or four years, which is pretty good for a piece of this extent.

“Moment” was published on BeeHive in 2001, and it appeared as a URL in Joe’s posts to webartery probably around 2000. And no one has written about it, that I know of. I think this is probably because Joe isn’t noisy about his work. But there it is on the Web, hopefully for many years to come. I regard it as one of the finer achievements in combining poetry, the visual, and programming for the Net. Also, if you know United States poetry, or more particularly, the poetics of the last twenty years in avant garde writing in the USA, you see that Joe Keenan is aware of language poetry and various strains of international visual poetry. “Moment” has its relations with various poetics, but stands as a unique achievement on its own.