AustLit

For well over two decades now, since the middle 1990s, Mez Breeze (born Mary-Anne Breeze), has remained at the forefront of digital and electronic poetics over a period of time in which its basic functions morphed or were variously updated. A full `cyberbibliography' of her career, from older work with `net.art narratives, through what she has thought of as the "Golden Phase of Mezangelle," to her work on games like #PRISOM (2013), will turn up a vast and evolving ouevre with recurrent strands. Her most well-known invention is the generative language of "Mezangelle," which uses code, MUD (Multi-User-Domain), online chatlogs, avatars, JavaScript and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as procedural, linguistic and textural means, and ends, for poetics. The result is an absorptive and playful reworking of these into poems and, as I will pay special attention to here, sequences of poems. Breeze's writingways share topoi that interweave the digital and ethics, language and ecology, the abstraction of contemporary life and what she described to me in an email as "A sense of sP[I]ace collapsing + concertinaed comprehension-nesting, of contractions and expansions." Such writing is situated in spatial locales both matrixial and fractal; "shaped by my own personal intrigue with language and the land, of openings within openings, of lingual whorls and patterns that blossom + contract." ' (Introduction)