Essay on Stephanie Strickland's "True North"
Finding Stephanie Strickland’s True North
by Dene Grigar
True North came out in 1997 in two formats. First, it was published as a print book of poetry by the University of Notre Dame Press and won––that same year––the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize. It also appeared as a hypertext poem published on floppy disk for both PC and Macintosh computers by Eastgate Systems, Inc. As Strickland states in her “Prologue,” work on True North began in 1995 at N. Katherine Hayles's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar but originally was conceived over a decade earlier when influenced by the writings of Simone Weil, she developed an interest in finding a woman’s language.
1997 Floppy Disks
Because Strickland did not own a Macintosh computer, she produced the hypertext version of True North on a PC. It is believed that this hypertext poem is the one of the first that Eastgate Systems, Inc. released for that platform. It was after she had begun work on it that she was told that the company wanted a Macintosh version along with the PC version. Collaborating with Eastgate Systems, Inc.’s editor, Diane Greco, over the phone and at the company’s office in Cambridge, Strickland developed the Macintosh version. Because the functionality differed between Storyspace for PC and Mac, Strickland needed a number of workarounds to get roughly comparable functionality for True North in the Mac version. She also had to write the instruction manual for both platforms from scratch since what she produced involved unique features that were not standard to Storyspace. Strickland also recalls exploiting certain quirks of the software for True North, as Deena Larsen had done with them for Samplers, bugs that the company later eliminated. [1]
The 1997 Storyspace Hypertext/The 1999 Web Poem
“To Be Here as Stone Is” technically was first published in 1997 as a 23-line poem appearing at the end of True North, following the section “True North 5,”about the potential of humanity to reach enlightenment. It was re-envisioned as a web poem with artist M. D. Coverley as collaborator and copyrighted in 1999.
The Storyspace hypertext features 16 of the poem’s words hyperlinked in red, blue, pink, green, blue-green, yellow-green, which as Strickland points out in her “Prologue,” are used as organizing elements in the work. [2] The fifth word of the poem, “stone,” for example is colored green and, when double-clicked, takes readers to the section in the “Contents” called “The Mother-Lost World,” also colored in green. As in this version of True North, “To Be Here as Stone Is” does not offer images. It is a text-based poem that employs hyperlinking for extending meaning.
The web poem copyrighted in 1999, is created with Microsoft Front Page 3.0 [3] for Netscape 4.x browsers. Though parts of it are still accessible with some contemporary browsers––for example, Safari 11.0.1––the use of Java Applets limits easy access to all of the poem. The web version, though, expands the color palette and spatial organization so that words cover other words or align beside them. On the interface that shows up when readers click on the word “Here” in the title colored red are 13 of the lines from the original version. These are colored gray and flow down the screen; the phrase, “sea-light opal,” found in this text, is highlighted in green. To the right, another line consisting of the first two of the poem’s lines flow down the page with a larger typeface and colored in green. Background images and colors, also unavailable options in Storyspace are used extensively in this poem. Contemporary readers comfortable with "dev tools" in their browsers can find the words to the entire poem using that method.
The 1999 CD-ROM
According to Strickland, she never saw the CD-ROM version of the work or was part of its production. While this version is listed in various scholarly book bibliographies and databases, like WorldCat, as having been published in 1997, this information is incorrect. [2] The CD-ROM version actually came out two years later in 1999. In May 1999 I was asked to review True North, which had just been recently released on CD-ROM, for American Book Review by Managing Editor Rebecca Kaiser. Kaiser had received my name to review the CD-ROM from Alt-X founder Mark Amerika, with whom I was corresponding about keynoting the 2000 Computers & Writing Conference I was co-hosting the following summer with artist-scholar John Barber. I turned in the review before the June 14th deadline, and it ran in the Fall 1999 issue, Volume 12. Thus, the CD-ROM was published some time between January and May 1999. [3]
Viewing the Storyspace Hypertext
True North for the Macintosh is installed on the computer with a VISE installer, a disk compression software program originally created for the Macintosh computer. While the work explores a topic as broad in scope as a “woman’s language” (Strickland, “Prologue”), it loads 79 nodes and 797 links, making it seem like one of the smaller works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. [4] The title page reads: “True North, or THE LI-LaDi World, Level Interaction – Lattice Dislocation.” The dominant color used for the typeface is blue; green and red are also used, though sparingly, for some letters and words. Also found on the title page is a list of materials readers can access along with the poem: a document called “How to Read in Storyspace,” which provides directions for how to navigate the work and use the various features in the toolbar; “Contents,” which functions as a navigational table of contents; “Maps,” which takes readers to the six maps associated with the main sections of the work; and an “Index,” a list of 70 hyperlinked terms.
Color is used extensively to highlight ideas and organize space. Headers of spaces, for example, each are given their own color, with the other elements found in that space displayed in black typeface. “The Mother-Lost World” is colored a lime green; “True North 1” ( as well as “2,” “3,” “4,” and “5”) are blue; “Blue Planet Blues” is a light blue; “Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind” is gray (perhaps reflecting gray-matter); “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting-in-Numbers” is pink; and “There Was an Old Woman” is light blue.
When I reviewed the work upon the CD-ROM’s release, I was curious about its relationship with the book because like a lot of scholars, I was interested in the affordances Storyspace (and other hypertext platforms) provided for changing human expression, as argued by hypertext theorists Jay David Bolter and others. I found the two iterations, in some respects, very similar. The “Contents,” which appears in both iterations, lists the same poems in the same order in hypertext version as they appear in the print edition. What is different, though, is the way Strickland uses hyperlinking and maps for navigation and the organization of the work around ideas, a functionality not possible to represent easily in print. The “Index,” which does not appear in the print edition, allows readers to navigate to individual poems facilely. “Alphabet,” for example, goes to the poem, “On First Looking Into Diringer’s The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind.” True North’s maps also connects words to visual representations of ideas, ultimately linking them to specifics poems. The maps include:
“Storyspace Map: True North” contains links to all 11 major sections of the poem as well as the additional information accompanying it (e.g. “Contents,” “Index,” “Acknowledgements”). Shaped like a woman’s breast, as Strickland suggests, the map reflects the life-giving properties of womanhood. The nipple is aligned with “True North 1,” a poem consisting of seven stanzas of three lines each that reminds readers that the power of humanity lies in language (“anyone / coming forward to speak / is using force––“) (13-15), and harkens back to Strickland's pursuit of a "Guneaform" ("Alphabet"), a woman's language.
Each of the maps that follow pertains to the section of the poem by the same name. “The Mother-Lost World Map,” like the “Storyspace Map,” is shaped like a breast. Outlining it are eight words: “Alphabet,” “Numbers,” “Agamemon,” “Rape,” “Order,” “Techni.con,” “Embryos,” and “Figures of Speech.” Below is the word along with the lexia the word leads to:
Some anomalies arise between the hypertext version and print edition and within the hypertext itself. There is no individual poem called “Agamemnon” in the book; rather, it is a quote from Iliad 1.184-187 that appears as a footnote in the next poem, “A History of Bearing Greek Gifts.” The order of these also differ slightly from that listed in the “Contents” in the hypertext. “Figures of Speech” appears last in the “Contents” though it shows up before “Pregnancy” and “Techni.con” on the map.
The other four maps also use shape to denote ideas. For example, “Blue Planet Blues Map” is rounded and resembles the contours of a planet, and “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting in Numbers Map,” is a series of poems referencing the ideas of famous mathematician Josiah Willard Gibbs, with graphical representation of his notion of thermodynamics. While Strickland states that True North is about “how basic bodily metaphors get translated into different kinds of language,” readers can recognize she does not limit her use of metaphor to the body. Rather, she constructs meaning through the relationship of visual representation of text and image.
As I started in the review of the 1999 version:
Despite the breadth of her vision and lushness of her words, Strickland was frustrated by the limitations of the medium for expressing her work and has stated most recently in the “Prologue” that she originally visualized the poem in 3D, a feature not possible on the net or web at the time.
[needs conclusion]
1997 Floppy Disks
Because Strickland did not own a Macintosh computer, she produced the hypertext version of True North on a PC. It is believed that this hypertext poem is the one of the first that Eastgate Systems, Inc. released for that platform. It was after she had begun work on it that she was told that the company wanted a Macintosh version along with the PC version. Collaborating with Eastgate Systems, Inc.’s editor, Diane Greco, over the phone and at the company’s office in Cambridge, Strickland developed the Macintosh version. Because the functionality differed between Storyspace for PC and Mac, Strickland needed a number of workarounds to get roughly comparable functionality for True North in the Mac version. She also had to write the instruction manual for both platforms from scratch since what she produced involved unique features that were not standard to Storyspace. Strickland also recalls exploiting certain quirks of the software for True North, as Deena Larsen had done with them for Samplers, bugs that the company later eliminated. [1]
The 1997 Storyspace Hypertext/The 1999 Web Poem
“To Be Here as Stone Is” technically was first published in 1997 as a 23-line poem appearing at the end of True North, following the section “True North 5,”about the potential of humanity to reach enlightenment. It was re-envisioned as a web poem with artist M. D. Coverley as collaborator and copyrighted in 1999.
The Storyspace hypertext features 16 of the poem’s words hyperlinked in red, blue, pink, green, blue-green, yellow-green, which as Strickland points out in her “Prologue,” are used as organizing elements in the work. [2] The fifth word of the poem, “stone,” for example is colored green and, when double-clicked, takes readers to the section in the “Contents” called “The Mother-Lost World,” also colored in green. As in this version of True North, “To Be Here as Stone Is” does not offer images. It is a text-based poem that employs hyperlinking for extending meaning.
The web poem copyrighted in 1999, is created with Microsoft Front Page 3.0 [3] for Netscape 4.x browsers. Though parts of it are still accessible with some contemporary browsers––for example, Safari 11.0.1––the use of Java Applets limits easy access to all of the poem. The web version, though, expands the color palette and spatial organization so that words cover other words or align beside them. On the interface that shows up when readers click on the word “Here” in the title colored red are 13 of the lines from the original version. These are colored gray and flow down the screen; the phrase, “sea-light opal,” found in this text, is highlighted in green. To the right, another line consisting of the first two of the poem’s lines flow down the page with a larger typeface and colored in green. Background images and colors, also unavailable options in Storyspace are used extensively in this poem. Contemporary readers comfortable with "dev tools" in their browsers can find the words to the entire poem using that method.
The 1999 CD-ROM
According to Strickland, she never saw the CD-ROM version of the work or was part of its production. While this version is listed in various scholarly book bibliographies and databases, like WorldCat, as having been published in 1997, this information is incorrect. [2] The CD-ROM version actually came out two years later in 1999. In May 1999 I was asked to review True North, which had just been recently released on CD-ROM, for American Book Review by Managing Editor Rebecca Kaiser. Kaiser had received my name to review the CD-ROM from Alt-X founder Mark Amerika, with whom I was corresponding about keynoting the 2000 Computers & Writing Conference I was co-hosting the following summer with artist-scholar John Barber. I turned in the review before the June 14th deadline, and it ran in the Fall 1999 issue, Volume 12. Thus, the CD-ROM was published some time between January and May 1999. [3]
Viewing the Storyspace Hypertext
True North for the Macintosh is installed on the computer with a VISE installer, a disk compression software program originally created for the Macintosh computer. While the work explores a topic as broad in scope as a “woman’s language” (Strickland, “Prologue”), it loads 79 nodes and 797 links, making it seem like one of the smaller works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. [4] The title page reads: “True North, or THE LI-LaDi World, Level Interaction – Lattice Dislocation.” The dominant color used for the typeface is blue; green and red are also used, though sparingly, for some letters and words. Also found on the title page is a list of materials readers can access along with the poem: a document called “How to Read in Storyspace,” which provides directions for how to navigate the work and use the various features in the toolbar; “Contents,” which functions as a navigational table of contents; “Maps,” which takes readers to the six maps associated with the main sections of the work; and an “Index,” a list of 70 hyperlinked terms.
Color is used extensively to highlight ideas and organize space. Headers of spaces, for example, each are given their own color, with the other elements found in that space displayed in black typeface. “The Mother-Lost World” is colored a lime green; “True North 1” ( as well as “2,” “3,” “4,” and “5”) are blue; “Blue Planet Blues” is a light blue; “Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind” is gray (perhaps reflecting gray-matter); “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting-in-Numbers” is pink; and “There Was an Old Woman” is light blue.
When I reviewed the work upon the CD-ROM’s release, I was curious about its relationship with the book because like a lot of scholars, I was interested in the affordances Storyspace (and other hypertext platforms) provided for changing human expression, as argued by hypertext theorists Jay David Bolter and others. I found the two iterations, in some respects, very similar. The “Contents,” which appears in both iterations, lists the same poems in the same order in hypertext version as they appear in the print edition. What is different, though, is the way Strickland uses hyperlinking and maps for navigation and the organization of the work around ideas, a functionality not possible to represent easily in print. The “Index,” which does not appear in the print edition, allows readers to navigate to individual poems facilely. “Alphabet,” for example, goes to the poem, “On First Looking Into Diringer’s The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind.” True North’s maps also connects words to visual representations of ideas, ultimately linking them to specifics poems. The maps include:
Storyspace Map: True North
The Mother-Lost World Map
Blue Planet Blues Map
Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind Map
Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting in Numbers Map
There Was an Old Woman Map
“Storyspace Map: True North” contains links to all 11 major sections of the poem as well as the additional information accompanying it (e.g. “Contents,” “Index,” “Acknowledgements”). Shaped like a woman’s breast, as Strickland suggests, the map reflects the life-giving properties of womanhood. The nipple is aligned with “True North 1,” a poem consisting of seven stanzas of three lines each that reminds readers that the power of humanity lies in language (“anyone / coming forward to speak / is using force––“) (13-15), and harkens back to Strickland's pursuit of a "Guneaform" ("Alphabet"), a woman's language.
Each of the maps that follow pertains to the section of the poem by the same name. “The Mother-Lost World Map,” like the “Storyspace Map,” is shaped like a breast. Outlining it are eight words: “Alphabet,” “Numbers,” “Agamemon,” “Rape,” “Order,” “Techni.con,” “Embryos,” and “Figures of Speech.” Below is the word along with the lexia the word leads to:
Alphabet: “On First Looking Into Diringer’s The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind”
Numbers: “Who Counts, Counts”
Agamemnon: “Agamemnon”
Rape: “A History of Bearing Greek Gifts”
Order: “Preservation of Order”
Figures of Speech: “Figures of Speech”
Pregnancy: “Pregnancy”
Techni.con: “Lodged in a Nursery Glass”
Some anomalies arise between the hypertext version and print edition and within the hypertext itself. There is no individual poem called “Agamemnon” in the book; rather, it is a quote from Iliad 1.184-187 that appears as a footnote in the next poem, “A History of Bearing Greek Gifts.” The order of these also differ slightly from that listed in the “Contents” in the hypertext. “Figures of Speech” appears last in the “Contents” though it shows up before “Pregnancy” and “Techni.con” on the map.
The other four maps also use shape to denote ideas. For example, “Blue Planet Blues Map” is rounded and resembles the contours of a planet, and “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting in Numbers Map,” is a series of poems referencing the ideas of famous mathematician Josiah Willard Gibbs, with graphical representation of his notion of thermodynamics. While Strickland states that True North is about “how basic bodily metaphors get translated into different kinds of language,” readers can recognize she does not limit her use of metaphor to the body. Rather, she constructs meaning through the relationship of visual representation of text and image.
As I started in the review of the 1999 version:
Stars and their wandering cousins, the planets, emerge as a dominant trope in the poem, both as the model of poetic structure (five points of a star / five parts of the poem / five paths leading to true north) and a reconsideration of their meaning (order and consistency before the Age of Enlightenment / disorder and chaos in the midst of postmodernism). Navigating by stars, and in particular, the North star, becomes the method by which the poet finds true north, her particular truth. Articulating this navigation through space and time as physical and temporal motion, Strickland moves from the particular, the oikos of the personal, with images of the star-shaped “embryo” “lodged in a nursery glass” and the child “riveted at night by the stars,” to the universal––starlight “sealed in gaze” and brilliant cut” “adrift in the empty aisles of the cosmos.
Despite the breadth of her vision and lushness of her words, Strickland was frustrated by the limitations of the medium for expressing her work and has stated most recently in the “Prologue” that she originally visualized the poem in 3D, a feature not possible on the net or web at the time.
[needs conclusion]