"dis/appear" is a simple tool for animating poetry over time.

It was created by Katy Ilonka Gero and Maxwell Neely-Cohen for the Graywolf LAB in 2023.

Try to see a poem as a glacier does. Or see it on the timescale of a beam of light. The only important thing is to see it anew.

Please use it any way you see fit. For example you can take screen recordings of your poem in motion, or take screenshots at optimal moments for "erasure" poetics. The code can be viewed through the developer tools on your browser, or downloaded, remixed, and played with on Glitch. We would love for you to mess with it!

The poem comes to you in a dream, on the bus, while staring at the wall. It emerges, becomes familiar. The words become your own. That turn of phrase, that perfect image. Seared into your mind. Then, you're not paying attention, you're looking elsewhere---it leaves. You forget a word or two, a line, the volta, what was it? The poem recedes. You don't recognize it anymore.