ABOUT

//STICKY //MELON is an experimental poetry project by Wesley Hicks. The goal of this website is to act as a testing ground for ways that poetry and webpage design and interface can interact.

Poetry should not be limited to words on a webpage, those words in everyway should be integrated into the way the web itself is constructed.

NOTES

Here are some notes on the various pages I have made. These notes are not intended to be read as canon to the works, but are to be a guide as to better understand my intentions and decision making for various projects.

I have made many entries in the series, most of them physical works of poetry that make use of unusual places for poetry or unusual  integration into functional objects.

What is important to me about the this style of writing is the ways that it translates my very compulsive and obsessive ways of thinking. It is in no way off to think of the writing as a kind of tourettes-poetry. The visual experience of it, the incongruity, the associative word use, the repetition and lush use of text characters that look-like-letters-but-are-not-letters-that-make-sounds all get at this experience. 

The idea that a profile can be a work of poetry is a highly provocative idea to me. I have used the profile in the screenshot on Growlr, Scruff, and Howlr for over 2 years. The overall reception has bee mixed. I would say overall it filtered out a lot of people the I probably would not have wanted to talk with anyways. I think making a hookup profile description a work of poetry does a good job of being both a poem and a object of utility (a profile description) rather well and that the poem gains a lot of context and nuance from its context that it fails to have outside of it. It also gains bonus points for making the context of sexual suggestion much more obvious.

5 was made shortly after adult content was banned on Tumblr. The sheer number of art works on tumblr that were purged as part of the policy change that I feel were simply not porn but were  highly nuanced works about identity and image that involve nudity in some way. I dont really feel like this is a finished work, I wanted to make better images then the ones i used but I never got around to it. Since this time of the purge the look of tumblr has changed considerably, but this work looks just like tumblr did at the time.

At the time of writing this Tennessee and Madison are not on the main page, neither is ready yet.

These three works are deeply troubled works.
In many ways I hope they trouble the viewer as I don’t want the content or tone to be pleasant or acceptable.
The events described and the incongruity of them are pulled from autobiographical moments that have become irrationally blended together.
The shared connective tissue is the overwhelmingly negative affect they had on me.

These works surround my attempts at buying a studio. My goal is to own a studio where I can make my expanded idea of what artwork is, I dont think I will be able to do it in a small space so I am looking for an unusual space that is MASSIVE. Each studio site I find that I think will work involved weeks of research and planning, and then various steps to try and buy it and finance a mortgage. I have faced unique discouragement and harassment during this process, and these negative interactions and the failure to buy the studio sites that interest me is what ties these works together.  I plan on making a work for each place I fail to get, until I move into my studio.

This work is uniquely bad, perhaps the worst work on this site. I remains as a reminder of how far I have come with the ideas and how useful this testing ground has been for me.