"In her work, digital poet Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) blends HTML and English together to create a language she calls “mezangelle,” intended to represent the mutual dependence of poetic language and code necessary to create e-poetry. In an interview for furtherfield.org, Mez tells co-founder of CONT3XT.NET42 Franz Thalmair: “much of my present output questions the concepts of “reality” + “virtual” + their systematic definition crumbling. i’m exploring how this disintegration may lead 2 a continuum approach of the real<--->virtual.”43 The clash of the real and the virtual is what’s at stake in Mez’s mezangelle codeworks, as the ‘real’ language of the artistic, poetic text is forced into visible interaction with the previously invisible, alien, ‘virtual’ language.

In a codework entitled “pro][tean][.lapsing.txts,”44 Mez presents the ‘clash concept’ at work in her mezangelle language through her mezangelle language. The work opens with a page of text in mezangelle, topped by the now-familiar coded header for an email:

From: “.dirtee codah.”
Date: Mon Feb 11, 2002 5:20 pm
Subject: N.formation.sources|{i. am. [trapped. in. seizure. language

The term “.dirtee codah.” functions as a hyperlink that takes the user to other parts of the work. Throughout this piece, Mez meditates on what it means to be ‘trapped in seizure language’—the language of the physical, epileptic seizure, but also the language of capture, of imprisonment. The particular linguistic construction of mezangelle ‘captures’ code within poetic language—or, perhaps, the poetic language within code—to create something that is “part girl| [part][ial][boy ().” If “The DNA of programmer fare is code:,”45 then mezangelle is the DNA for a world balanced between the push of poetic language and the pull of code; a ‘dirty,’ troubled language that puts pressure on the conflict, the duende, between the two forces."

- Amanda G. Michaels, Digital Duende: Reading the Rasp in E-Poetry