Ask Me for the Moon

• CreatorJohn Zuern
• Year Published2005
• Originally Published byThe Iowa Review Web

Originally published by The Iowa Review Web in 2005, "Ask Me for the Moon" was re-published in the Electronic Literature Collection 3 in 2016. As the author writes: "'Ask Me for the Moon' started out as an experiment to see how the animation, hyperlinking, and scripting capacities of Flash might facilitate a hybrid variety of poetry-as-scholarship. I was looking for a way to bring concrete details of my experience of working in Waikīkī into some kind of dialogue with what I was learning about the history and politics of the tourism industry in Hawai‘i. I wanted the poetry to quote but also, in a sense, to inhabit and illuminate the writing of philosophers and critics, calling attention to their own deployment of image and metaphor. At the time, it seemed important to keep the file size as small as possible, and notions of compression and constraint wound up governing many of my formal considerations, including my decision to write in haiku, to employ a somewhat restricted vocabulary and palette, and to include small images with minimal animation."--From Electronic Literature Collection 3