Knoebel`s "Heart Pole" is part of his Click Poetry collection and features a circular globe of words with two rings spinning at 90 degrees from one another, "moment to moment" and "mind absorbing." A longer narrative sequence, imaged as a plane undulating in space, can be manipulated by clicking and dragging. The narrative, focalized through the memories of a third-person male persona, recalls the moment between waking and sleeping when the narrator`s mother is singing him to sleep with a song composed of his day's activities. But like the slippery plane that shifts in and out of legibility as it twists and turns, this moment of intimacy is irrevocably lost to time, forming the "heart pole" that registers both its evocation and the on-goingness that condemns even the most deeply seated experiences. In the interplay of words and space, Knoebel´s letters become three-dimensional, challenging print-based habits. One need only recall Edward Abbott's Flatland to imagine how, as text leaps from the flat plane of the page to the interactive space of the screen, new possibilities emerge: for example, by holding the mouse key and moving text in 3D, the reader is confronted with a fluid materiality of text that can be read upside-down, backwards or even from behind.

Parts of this description are cited from N. Katherine Hayles, New Horizons for the Literary (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).