How coded is that : reading Susan Wheeler
Pam Brown Now that no one can remember how they lived before computers came into their homes almost a quarter of a century ago, I thought I’d say something here about Susan Wheeler’s Source Codes. It’s a collection of poetry, drafts, code and photo-collages published back in 2001. At first these poems can seem discordant but if you stick with them you’ll find that they’re firmly congruent with their sources, and are, in fact, assiduously organised. A ‘source code’ is a written instruction in a list of textual commands that programmers compile and translate into ‘machine code’ that a computer…