"I love writers like ee cummings and Emily Dickinson that push the norm and play with the accepted standards. I’m intrigued by Breeze’s style which appears to push the envelope even farther. The question that logically follows, though, is at what point do we loose the art itself in our attempts to break the mold? Is there some form required to keep within the parameters of art? What separates art from nonart?
...
If nothing else, this challenges me to experiment with incorporating other mediums within my own writing. I also have a tendency to want to use the high vocabulary I work so hard to equip my students with, but this article has challenged me to consider using more vernacular wordings and phrases. Finally, I am challenged to consider poetry to be more than just words on a page."

-prematurely grey

"One of this week’s readings is a very strange looking piece by a writer called “Mez”, which utilizes the language and typography of ‘code’ to make its point about the potential differences between online and print forms...Mez’s website contains some examples of her work and details of the language she calls _mezangelle_ and which contains elements of email code, HTML and other more sophisticated programming languages."

- From: HAM422 - A group blog on creative writing and new media

"As you can see, the code-snippet only shows previews to linked pages on other domains. So Mez created a quick-and-easy blog dis[ap]posable, put up a few technically very simple HTML pages on another server, and linked to them from her poem. Ta-da: instantly a new genre is born.....there's something about taking disposable, ready-made, super-easy bits and pieces and putting them together as Mez has done that's just really fascinating. Yes, you can do that. Very simply. And by putting the link preview thing to a purpose other than its intended purpose (as Duchamp did with his pissoir) Mez has me seeing it all anew." - Jill Walker on jill/txt

"In her brilliant analysis of MEZ’s “code-wurk,” Rita Raley demonstrates that the reading process is significantly altered with a mezangelled text, for the decoding that normally constitutes literary reading is here disrupted by visual signs that have no phonemic equivalent, for example the “][“ symbol or a word like “libr][bin][ary.” This is a language that cannot be spoken in all its fullness. The historic evolution of a system of marks tied to oral articulation is disrupted and re-encoded as a system of mixed phonemes and code symbols that can be read and apprehended but not spoken. Thus “la langue” of Saussure and the generations of semioticians following him is displaced by a language system that can be fully understood only by a bilingual reader who knows both English and code.

Spoken language cannot be the desired object of study, as it was for Saussure, who saw written language as derivative and secondary. It is not oral articulations but inscriptions that are central in this language system, and moreover inscriptions that go deep into the machine. As the code symbols continually remind us, the screen text is only the topmost part of the language system; underlying the screen text are layers and layers of coding languages essential for producing the surface text. To read mezangelle is to experience a world in which language is inextricably in-mixed with code and code with language, creating a creolized discourse in which the human subject is constituted through and by intelligent machines."

- N. Katherine Hayles, "Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature".

"When I first encountered mez's work the association with contemporary clichés of language didn't even occur to me for quite some time - i saw it as something else completely. the difference: CONTENT/intent. mez doesn't play this way with language because of trendi-ness or eaze, but with deliberate intent/choice. [this] FORM as integral to her content, and as [a] form of communication which is distinguished by her particular content/treatment/meaning ... also, it doesn't read with the eaze that phonetic treatment of language usually duz - in youth filled chat rooms for instance - one has to dig a bit, step back and read with conscious intent/concentration if one's is to actually gather what's being said, which brings a new attention to reading, akin to that which we bring to Shakespeare, etc."

-Claire Dinsmore, Cauldron & The Net

Write sites: Kirsten Krauth looks at words on the net.
"A chaotic landscape of new language. Words crossed out become strong enough to explode. A challenge, this cybernetic form like Shakespeare, inventive and striking. Fleshis.tics, an erotic mo[ve]ment, a roll of the code. I am getting overtaken by square brackets. The question at the bottom of the scroll bar r u cur[e].i.ous? and yes, I am, I am in a hurry to control and master these strokes, these unconventions."
-Reprinted from Realtime, Issue 27.