For a sickening moment he tried to retain his old up-and-down orientation, his body attempting to right itself, searching for the gravity that wasn’t there. Then he forced himself to change his view. He was hurtling toward a wall. That was down. And at once he had control of himself. – Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

How do we read a text that removes the stabilizing spatial coordinates of the page and no longer maintains a top-centric and left-centric orientation? How do we read texts that do not simply simulate dimension but in fact materialize and operate on the z-axis? Here, Ender’s Game is suggestive: what Ender Wiggin has to learn about the null-gravity Battle Room is that it requires a fundamental reorientation of spatial perspective. Indeed, the players’ successful navigation and battle victories depend on their capacity to adapt to a space with a different spatial logic. So, too, a three-dimensional text – whether it be presented in the immersive reading environment of a Cave, a game space, a QuickTime video, or a Javascript poem – requires an adaptive flexibility that we might even call a new mode of reading, a “deep reading.”

My thinking about the theme of this issue – Writing.3D – did not begin with a consideration of video installations or gaming spaces, as one would perhaps initially expect, but with a consideration of a set of works that gestured toward the realization of three dimensions within the space of a poetic text. In David Knoebel’s Java series, Click Poetry: Words in Space (2001), for example, “Oh” creates the illusion of sphericality; the words in “Walkdont” spin on the subsidiary axes of an invisible mobile; and “A Fine View” reproduces the cinematic illusion of 3D by miming the roll-out of the prologue to Star Wars. Ted Warnell’s “Codepoetry” brings the suggestion of depth and three dimensionality to the fore with its intricate embedding of a symbolic z-axis within the work. The frame of the visual poem appears as the single face of a cube, each letter of the words “code poetry” laid out along invisible gridlines and marked with a coordinate. Not only do the letters themselves take the form of a “z,” but graphing the coordinates themselves reveals the form of another “z.”

In this special issue of TIR Web we will see a collection of texts in which three dimensionality is suggested and some in which it is actually realized….” Continue reading Editor’s Introduction: Writing.3D by Rita Raley, The Iowa Review - Web.