May 4, 2025 ☼ internet ☼ poetry ☼ links

🔗 William H. Dickey, HyperPoems

Beginning in 1988, Dickey used the HyperCard software on his Macintosh SE to compose what would become fourteen “HyperPoems.” None were ever published in his lifetime. Plans for a comprehensive posthumous edition (prepared for publication on floppy disk with technical and editorial assistance from Deena Larsen) ultimately went unfulfilled. With the exception of a small number included on a CD-ROM with The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2002), the poems lay inert and unread and mostly forgotten until recovered from Larsen’s laptop at the University of Maryland by Professor of English and Digital Studies Matthew Kirschenbaum in 2019.

The availability of the HyperCard Online emulator at the Internet Archive (in Dickey’s own home city of San Francisco) finally offers us a platform. All fourteen of the HyperPoems appear here with the permission of Dickey’s literary executor, Dr. Susan Tracz.