This has been a major project of mine and Stephanie’s over the past year. We started seriously working on this project on December 15, 2009, when we met for the first of a few days in New York to discuss and start developing it. I thought it might take only a few days to complete – not a completely outrageous idea, since I have been working on tiny poetry generators such as “The Two”<\/a> those in the ppg256 series,<\/a> which were not time-consuming to produce. As you might guess, since it was just published today (on December 16, 2010), I was wrong about the time it would take. But, I am delighted that the project is appearing now in wonderful company in Dear Navigator,<\/i><\/a> a beautiful and appropriately-named journal.<\/p>\n If memory serves, Stephanie and I met at Digital Arts and Culture ’99 in Atlanta. I remember the conversation we had about innovative literature soon afterwards at Limbo, a long-gone coffeehouse on Avenue A in New York. Stephanie offered her advice as I was putting together my application to the Boston University poetry program – one way in which she’s long been a mentor as well as a friend. We’ve served the Electronic Literature Organization together; I had the chance to collaborate with her in editing the Electronic Literature Collection,<\/i> volume 1; and I’ve gotten to read with her and present in the same session at conferences many times over the years. Sea and Spar Between,<\/i> though, is our first collaboration as poets.<\/p>\n We have a short statement about the project on the “How to Read Sea and Spar Between<\/i>“<\/a> page; the text also appears on the page of Dear Navigator<\/i> that introduces and links to the piece. I won’t quote from that page here, but I’ll mention that the generator produces a navigable space of stanzas and draws on the vocabulary of and our readings of Dickinson and Melville.<\/p>\n A few words about our collaboration on Sea and Spar Between:<\/i> I sketched in code as the two of us worked together; we looked at and ran many intermediate versions as we figured out how we wanted to generate lines. I wrote the early versions of the stanza generator in Python, because I find that a better language to think and sketch in than JavaScript. Although I was the one who did the programming, Stephanie and I worked closely on all aspects of the project together: The strings that serve as data, the way lines are assembled, the way stanzas are assembled, the overall interface, and beyond. She and I were even working together to properly comment the code as the new issue of Dear Navigator<\/i> was preparing for launch.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-content\/stuff\/dear_navigator_2.png\"\/)
<\/a>![](\"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-content\/stuff\/sasb_stanzas.png\"\/)
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