I like the dynamic words of simply7 by Deena Larsen. It’s billed as a Flash treatise on the nature of language in electronic poetry. The words in this piece reflect words more closely to the way they behave in our minds than we are used to seeing when we read a text. Words don’t hold still in our minds, as they do on a printed page. Words don’t come in only one version in our minds; we often go through multiple possible speeches or drafts in our minds, simultaneously and quickly. We often think of several words that could do, but we must choose only one to fill its slot in a sentence. We sometimes have words behind words in our minds, one word we think behind the word we put out front, in public. Words in simply7 reflect all this.

The only thing I don’t like about simply7 is that there is a slight glitch when clicking on the button to play the Flash piece. When I see a button, I’m accustomed to being able to click once on it, quickly. When I clicked on the button in this piece, it turned color, but nothing happened until I held the mouse button down for a couple of seconds. This feature may be intentional, since new media pieces often deliberately introduce elements that are challenging to the user’s ability to navigate the interface. In this instance, if it is intentional, it seems unwise to me. After all, most people won’t even wait longer than 10 seconds for a page to download, and they won’t even click more than three times to get to the content they want within a website. New media is not popular with the public. It’s unlikely that most visitors would have had the patience to keep on trying to make something happen, as I did.

Even so, once I got past this initial annoyance, I enjoyed simply7. It reminded me of a dream I once had, in which all my words were constantly evolving and interacting, and there was no such thing as a static word in my speech or writing. There were actually morphing runes coming out of my mouth. It was like the runes really fit the nature of reality. I woke up wondering if aliens on some planet might experience their whole language in this way, taking it completely for granted. Maybe one of these times, I’ll attempt to reproduce this dream in Flash.