Here’s the description you can find in the Info tab of Sea of Po itself:
“It’s an appzine of 52 poets in a generative, kinetic, interactive, never-the-same-twice experience of 15 languages. It’s a new experience of poetry and poetry magazines. It also animates and saves your texts, and creates deluxe screenshots. Yes, it’s the Swiss army knife of digital poetry magazines and a literary blast of computer art.”
One of the dimensions of Sea of Po is that it involves 15 multi-language poems, typically an English and other version. The languages include Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Serbian, French, Spanish, Trinidadian patois, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Portuguese and Polish. One of the profound promises of the net is a global network that brings people together around the world. With the advent of unicode, which makes it much easier to code multiple languages on one web page, that promise comes a little closer though, of course, we don’t exactly live in one big happy world so there are many impediments. But I wanted Sea of Po to be a shining example of international cooperation, communication, and vision of shared world poetry. That has been one of the aspirations of net art from the start, that crossing of borders, both geographical and conceptual.
There is an additional type of exploration of unicode in Sea of Po: several of the 52 contributors created what we might call code poetry, in that the symbols are not alphabetical but draw on the vast stores of non-alphabetic unicode characters. That is true of my own poems in Sea of Po at https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=ja . So Sea of Po is also a wider exploration of unicode as the basic language tool we have for textual communication using computers.
Another dimension of Sea of Po is its different representations of poetry. There’s the black window, in which poems are represented and readable in the usual way. Then there’s the animated representation of the poem. This brings together the print-minded view of poetry and a more digital approach. Sea of Po attempts to be cubistic or multi-perspectival on poetry itself, viewing it from different angles.
Another dimension of Sea of Po is that the wreader can create and save their own texts/animations, as you can see at https://seaofpo.vispo.com/?q=1 . Sea of Po does not just have readers. It has wreaders. It is significantly interactive. Wreaders can enter/edit/recall/delete/save their texts and configure the animations (https://seaofpo.vispo.com/?q=2 ) in some detail. How many literary mags do you know that have some sort of feature like that?
Another dimension of Sea of Po is you can play it like a Tanguyrean submariner.
z key: previous animation
x key: reanimate current animation
c key: next animation
This is so that poets can use Sea of Po as a poetry performance tool. They can display the poem/animation on a screen, perform it, and play it on the keyboard, moving from verse/stanza/poem to verse/stanza/poem.
Another dimension of Sea of Po is that you can create high-res screenshots ( https://seaofpo.vispo.com/?q=6 ). Not simply blown up to high-res. True high-res suitable for print, even very large print. This is appropriate for a project that bridges print and digital.
Another dimension is its attempt to be interesting visually. Each animation/verse can have its own HSLA color palette ( https://seaofpo.vispo.com/?q=5 ), which is a range of hue values, a range of saturation values, a range of lightness values, and a range of alpha values. These palettes can range from a narrow band of gray-scale tones to the full rainbow of colors. I find HSL a much better colour model than RGB.
Another dimension of the project is the documentation of it, which is not an insignificant part of the project. That’s at https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Sea_of_Po2.pdf . This is a manifesto + manual + magazine. The manifesto is mainly about the vision of the literary magazine as an appzine, but it covers other interesting ground also. The manual is about how to create your own texts/animations with Sea of Po. And how to navigate among the works of the 52 poet contributors. The magazine sometimes includes writing about the contributors. Sometimes they themselves write about the multi-language poem or other things. Sometimes their entry is another version of their poem that appears in Sea of Po.
One of the ambitions, for me, with this project was to reconnect with old friends. The lead work, ie, the work you get by default when you open Sea of Po, is by two old friends of mine named Yumie Kono and Ariel O’Sullivan. They’ve just published a book (in Japan) that translates 60 tankas by Yumie’s mom, Hideko Kono, who survived the Hiroshima bomb. Yumie did too, but she was 1 at the time. The father and son weren’t so lucky. These are important, newly published (in English) poems that bear witness to one of history’s most devastating attacks with new technology. I was afraid the colorfulness of Sea of Po would be at odds with the somber nature of the poems, but Yumie and Ariel like the result, and so do I. And the visuality of the Japanese text is astonishing.
Many of the contributors used the Sea of Po editor ( https://seaofpo.vispo.com/?q=1 ) to create work specially for Sea of Po. And many of them did so at a time when the code was less than robust. They helped me a lot to debug the code and create a robust editor. They were patient and it was great working with all of them. The editor was the hardest part of writing all the code in Sea of Po, which I did. Other contributors simply gave me a poem and I configured the animation for Sea of Po. It was a tremendously rewarding process for me, working with old and new friends on this ambitious literary/digital project. I wrote all the JavaScript, HTML and CSS in this project.