This Is Not A Poem

This Is Not A Poem "is a fantastic appropriation of Joyce Kilmer's famous poem Trees. It's a digital poem that's well worth interacting with and performs a creative critique of — for better or worse — one of the most well-known poems in American literature." -- Michael Leong

"Alan Bigelow offers us each a chance to continually dismantle and reassemble an old chestnut of a poem — Joyce Kilmer’s Trees — as a computerized voice tries to make sense of the scraps we’ve left it.  This Is Not a Poem, as Bigelow notes, is infinitely playable, and, on one level is something like a playable turntable, but on another level it asks its readers (or, perhaps, inter-actors) to deconstruct an archaic poem and reconstruct it in ever changing ways. It is not only a re-envisioning of an antiquated piece of art, but a challenge to the whole realm of such artifacts. By co-opting Kilmer’s Trees, it could be argued that Bigelow is making a statement about not only the Earth’s actual environment, but about the old Trees of writing, those standby materials and forms that may or may not have outlived their usefulness." -- from The New River Journal