What distinguishes these texts is the way they were written and the way they were intended to be read: on a portable handheld computer, or "PDA," like the popular Palm Pilot. Whenever the urge struck, I composed on a 3"x3" screen with a stylus. Consequently, no poem here is longer than eleven lines and each of those lines contains eight words at best. Brevity and word economy was the rule. But if you study them, unique structures and patterns will emerge. The medium certainly shaped the message.
As did the genre. Gorelets are "horror" poems: a mode of writing which explores the "dark side" and muses over morbid themes like death, murder, disease, mutation, chaos, mutilation, the uncanny and all things outré. This is the genre I work in, mostly because I believe it is the most experimental popular genre. In it, one expects the unexpected, which requires the writer to break with convention at every turn.
Tapping into the popularity of the fiction genre, horror also brings a new audience to poetry. That was part of my goal: to get more readers in the digital age to take notice of poetry. When I began this project I realized that e-books (texts intended to be read on PDAs) were everywhere, but none of them were poetry. And poetry just seemed to "fit" the screen better than long, eternally scrolling documents written for print rather than pixels.
Here you are given the opposite: electronic text that has been transported back to the printed page. Gorelets were like applets — tiny computer applications — only darker than the usual fare. I think these pieces will stand up just as well in this slim volume as they did on a screen the size of gauze bandage.
Read and bleed. They’ll be quick jabs, but I hope nothing will clot the cut.
— Michael Arnzen, Halloween 2003
