Today we do not only see the convergence of many modern and postmodern strategies in literature, forming that “difficult whole” McHale enumerates in his work on postmodern long poems, The Obligation Toward a Difficult Whole, but we are also living in an eruption of digital technologies which today are considered by most to be media, and thus called new media. riverIsland, I argue, is a meta-text and a paradigmatic example of new media poetry as instantiation of many different concurrent strategies and traditions (with highly diverse genealogies) which co-exist now. In my reading I focus on the morphing in riverIsland as one of those strategies.

Artikeln behandlar en analys av det digitala poetiska verket, riverIsland, av John Cayley. Specifikt analyseras den kinetiska tekniken "text morphing" som poetisk form. Artikelförfattaren hävdar att diktverket utgör ett paradigmatiskt exempel på den konvergens och komplexitet av poetiska tekniker som digital poesi uppvisar.