Hours of the Night is an experimental poem that reflects a concern with subjects often avoided and also a concern with the portability of software in the current platform-rich e-lit environment. Addressing age and aging, sleep and the night, it was written to be read in PowerPoint. We wanted to make use of a widely available and easily managed platform, and we believed that PowerPoint represents a popular, standard, authoring system, the products of which can be read on any desktop computer, tablet, or smart phone.

As it turned out, making and porting PowerPoint work is more difficult than we anticipated. We are, accordingly, sending both the PowerPoint 13 file and an MP4 version. The MP4 version will work on any computer that plays video. The PowerPoint version can be played on a Windows machine that has the fonts (included here for download) and a recent version of PowerPoint. We ask that the jurors download the MP4 file and play fullscreen on their particular machine. They may also view the standalone (subtly different) PowerPoint slideshow on any Windows machine with PowerPoint once the included font files have been installed.