Probably the best bibliography is maintained by Michael Shumate at Duke University, including works by those trying to get out of the link-node box:
http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html
To add just one more on top of this comprehensive list, I recommend a book that is not about hypertext at all:
Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine; The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group by Steve McCaffery & bpNichol. Research into experimental fiction that includes theories of geomantic translation, pataphysics, the language of performance, comic strip formalism, pop-up books, scratch-n-sniff, and much more.
Two of the poets/poetries we discussed:
John Cayley -- aleatory poems and collocations http://www.inforamp.net/~cayley/wshome.html#KINETIC
Jim Rosenberg -- word nets, diagrammatic syntax http://www.well.com/user/jer/poetries.html
also, new from a Stanford alum, "Patchwork Girl" by Shelley Jackson
Finally, to contextualize a bit of our discussion, here's the series of flea hops from Micheal Joyce's "Afternoon, A Story" referenced in our discussion:
No one there. Everyone here.
Here is all there is but there seems so insistently across the way Robert Creeley / Pieces | | ____ | | | I try to recall winter. "As if it were yesterday?" she says, but I do not signify one way or another.
By five the sun sets and the afternoon melt freezes again across the blacktop into crystal octopi and palms of ice--rivers and continents beset by fear, and we walk out to the car, the snow moaning beneath our boots and the oaks exploding in series along the fenceline on the horizon, the shrapnel settling like relics, the echoing thundering off far ice. This was the essenceof wood, these fragments say. And this darkness is air.
Here are my notes on this sequence:
Creeley's poem was chosen, presumably, to comment on the larger story's mode of presentation and narrative thematics. Like "Afternoon," "here" leaves readers asking, 'What is the antecedent?', to the poem's partial act of representation. Even more than the story itself, Creeley's poem lacks immediate referentiality and all sense of place is dislocated. Only the copulative "or" gives a place,"here," a tentative context in relation to some "happening." Thus, there is the irony of the enjambment in lines two and three which affords "event" some kind of independent status and, one line later, suggests "event" is restricted by the perspective of any single observer. So Creeley is not relying on the combinatory effect of grammar, with its causal linkages, to create precision; rather, in the sliding from "here" to "there," from "No one" to "Everyone," it is clear that such dislocations are built into our language: "Here is all there is" (my italics). And in that common phrase the subject has undergone a transformation from one discrete stage to another, from here to there--and yet again in the poem's concluding lines. In breaking up very prose-like sentences into elements that often do not correspond to syntactical elements, Creeley isolates active parts of a sentence and foregrounds discontinuities that are smoothed over in the cumulative logic of grammatical prose. We could further isolate words or word groupings in Creeley's lines to emphasize different latent meanings and contexts (e.g. Here is all / there is but there / . . .).
What I am trying to suggest is that Creeley's poem is a kind of self-contained hypertext; the poem departs from a norm of ordinary English usage--rather, highlights something very unusual in ordinary language--and, in doing so, moves readers into a more thoroughly disjunctive terrain in which readers might establish any number of mininarratives in the space that gets opened up. Is the "No one / there" in stanza two pointing up the lack of an 'observer elect' ("the observer" from stanza one)? Does stanza three reinstate someone "insistently across the way"? Creeley's poem invites readers to establish such relationships in multiple causal linkages it makes available--invites readers to recognize that such relationships are enacted by our language, even if we are not consciously aware of them, all the time. I would suggest that the links of hypertextual narratives should make possible a similar series of relationships in the space they open up between narrative nodes. In a sense, I am suggesting the need for a more explicit understanding of the "syntax" of links within hypertexts. (Link to hear more on links) Furthermore, and this is important as it is often overlooked, these links should reassert, rather than attenuate, the textual power of each individual node (as Creeley maximizes the potential of each word in his self-contained hypertextual poem). To borrow from (and adapt) Creeley's signature line, "(hypertext) should never be more than an extension of content."
and so on...I go on to argue that there is less irony and little tension in Joyce's overwrought metaphors....
--john