Wallace Stevens’ poem “Fabliau of Florida” is a special edition from Ana María Caballero and hieroglyphica’s sold-out generative collection POEMS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN [PITPD]. This artwork was live-coded during South Florida's IGNITE Art + Tech Festival in January 2023, during which participants submitted comments that were incorporated into the project’s algorithm to create this unique, hand-annotated poem.

The Project

PITPD explores authorship. When a poem enters the public domain, it no longer belongs to its author but to its readers. In the intimate moments we read a poem, we link it to our private, pulsating worlds & help ensure others will read it, too. If history’s palms hadn’t held Sappho’s words, our fingers wouldn’t be holding them now. PITPD honors and reproduces this process.

The verses vanish – just like our memory of their exact words might fade – but distilled, standout moments of personal connection remain. In time, even these wane, providing a scarcely perceptible backdrop as the poem is discovered & interpreted anew. The result is a new form of poetic anthology – one that celebrates the role of the reader in shaping the life of a poem.

Readers write poetry's survival.

How to View

This piece is a live generative animation. Use touch or spacebar to pause and resume the animation. Resize or refresh the browser window to generate a new sequence of readers and comments.

If you are on a platform that does not support HTML tokens and are seeing only the preview GIF, you can view the actual token at the "animation_url" listed in the metadata.

Links for More Information

View the original collection
HERE

Find additional details about the piece in our
COMPANION ARTICLE

Learn more about
IGNITE BROWARD 2023

A big thank you to all the participants whose comments comprise this work!