View source for To Find the White Cat in the Snow

David Herrstrom's "To Find the White Cat in the Snow," takes the modernist practice of thematically or associatively linking sections of a poem, and carries it a step further with hypertext. Like Wallace Stevens in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," Herrstrom provides no narrative links between the sections of his poem. Unlike Stevens, Herrstrom is not constrained by the technology of print to present the stanzas of his poem sequentially, in a manner best suited to narrative. His poem is not a narrative and it is not ordered as if it were. It's ordering is hypertextual: the reader controls the sequence in which the stanzas appear and disappear. "To Find the White Cat . . ." is about, among other things, the difficulty of apprehension and the interrelationship of the phenomenal and the conceptual.

(Source: The New River, Editor's note by Ed Falco)