What happens to poetry when it goes online

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What happens to poetry when it goes online?

• Marcelo Moreschi

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What happens with poetry when it goes online?

• how the Internet changes the circulation and
  availability of poetic texts
• how new poetic practices incorporate and explore
  the new media environment

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Circulation/availability

• Is the internet poetry friendly?
• www.poetry.com

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Avant-garde poetry archives

• Ubu Web (http//www.ubu.com/)
• Electronic Poetry Center (http//epc.buffalo.edu/)
  (more than 10 million users annually from 90
  countries)
• http//www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
• http//www.futurism.org.uk/

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Online poetry journals

• www.jacketmagazine.com (500,000 visits since
  1997)
• www.epoetry.org
• www.octopusmagazine.com

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Blogs

• Ron Sillimans blog (http//ronsilliman.blogspot.c
  om/) (more than 615,000 visitors. Never had a
  book that sold more than 4,000 copies)

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Circulation/availability

• New instances of publishing, publicizing,
  discussion and canonization
• It is a new literary system or a new subsystem
  within the system?

Silliman I buy more books than I did before,
in good part because the distribution system for
printed poetry is so abysmal. But that really
doesnt matter when every small press can sell
direct, or at least can get their work into the
online catalogue of Small Press Distribution
(http//www.spdbooks.org/) Charles Bernstein, in
the early beginning of the Web I dont believe
that technology creates improvement, but rather
that we need to use the new technologies in order
to preserve the limited cultural spaces we have
created through alternative, nonprofit literary
press and magazines. This is particularly
important for poetry on the net because the
formats and institutions we are now establishing
can provide models and precedents fro
small-scale, poetry intensive activities
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New media poetry
If you look at experimental poetry of the 20th
century, works by Futurists, Dada poets,
Apollinaire, Schwitters, Concrete Poets, Sound
Poets, LANGUAGE poets, Burroughs, Howe,
Antin, Cage, you see a consistent attention to
the relation of technology to art. But more so,
you see a will to bend the instruments of
technology to engage and recontextualize the
possibilities for art in a new age. At this
crucial time, the form of practice of e-poetry
that interests me has this focus and is
invigorated by a mission to interrogate the
possibilities for the new media innovation Loss
Pequeño Glazier

• Incorporation of media and reading/writing
  technologies into poetry making, in order to
  rethink technology, poetry and their relation
• Electing precursors, proposing genealogies

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Strategies and resources explored
Exemples Letters Demand Things, Micheal
Medsen Clues, Robert Kendall Click Poetry,
David Knoebel I am simply saying, Deena
Larsen Mez, Mary-Anne Breeze Cog, Loss Pequeño
Glazier The Dreamlife of letter, Kluge,
Brian Kim Stefans Google does poetry Get a
Google Poem, Leevi Lehto, 11 (2), Lisa
Jevbratt Ambient Fish, Caroline Bergvall

• Hypertext
• Interactivity
• Game-like action
• Various multimedia elements
• Aleatory creations
• Computer generated texts
• Exploration of aspects of networked environment

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Terminology

• (Rickey and Beaulieu)
• e-distribution
• e-publishing
• e-translation
• e-poetry

• Other terms
• new media poetry/new media poetics
• digital poetry
• cybertext
• ergodic poetry requires a "non-trivial effort"
  to traverse the text. This effort must be
  extranoematic, that is, it must consist of more
  than simply reading by moving one's eyes along
  lines of text, turning pages and mentally
  interpreting what one reads. The term was coined
  by Espen Aarseth in his book Cybertext--Perspectiv
  es on Ergodic Literature, and is derived from the
  Greek words ergon, meaning "work" and hodos,
  meaning "path". (Ubuweb listserv)

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Critical issues

• Author/reader relationship
• reading experience
• what is new in new media poetry
• electronic poetry or electronic poetry (role of
  language in more conceptual works.)
• poetics of click and drag (Perloff)

• Subjectivity/authorship, specially in
  computer/algorithm generated texts
• code and poetry
• Uniqueness of display
• describing/searching aesthetic experiences in
  specific situation of data transmission/retrieving
  (transcendental data hypothesis, sublime. Liu)

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• Chopsticks can either be a simple eating utensil
  or a deadly weapon, depending on who uses them
• Bill Viola (apud Perloff)