Published in Poetry Project Newsletter #180, June-July 2000

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version. Original version copyright (c) 2000 Poetry Project Newsletter.

Please, Use Your Browser's "Back" Button
Brian Lennon

Self-appointed custodians of the avant-garde can lately be heard pronouncing dicta on the appropriate use of "the Internet" for poetry. The accelerating sophistication of various media grafted to Internet --- most importantly, but by no means limited to, the World Wide Web --- has generated a new futurist dogma that dismisses the lagging attempts of the "new mainstream" (which means: the old avant-garde) to bring its writing practice into contact with what it's been missing. So that when I hear it opined that electronic publications are duty-bound to exploit fully the features of the medium unavailable to readers of printed books, I always get a little impatient, myself: there have been many plain old books worth reading, it seems to me, between the respectively advanced technologies of the medieval manuscript and our own, overexposed McSweeney's. New forms of Internet-dependent writing/coding are flourishing, and a good deal of it is important and extraordinary: think of the "etym[aul]ogies" of Mary-anne Breeze, aka "mez" (Australia), Alan Sondheim's technolyric Internet Text (USA), Jim Andrews's "infoanimism" (Canada/USA), the visual code poetries of Ted Warnell (Canada), or, in a quite different vein, the quasi-apocryphal "dyscodings" to be found at jodi.org, 0100101110101101.ORG, and m9ndfukc.com, to single out (unfairly) a few of the most visible. Not merely an incitement to brave new poetries, however, Internet is also --- and perhaps more significantly thus far --- an inexpensive distribution system for "old" ones as well. In the gift economies of "otherstream" poetry, it is perfectly forgivable, I think, simply to transfer one's operations from the print medium to the Web, without feeling --- yet --- any ethical imperative to program.

In that spirit, a few sites worth visiting in this "middle zone," distinguished, for the most part, not for technical innovation so much as their flotation "never in and never out of print":

Jacket (http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/), ed. John Tranter. Ten quarterly issues online as of this writing. In some ways the most accessible of this group: cleanly designed, hyperannotated with hints, tips, and directions, and profusely illustrated. From a home base in Australia, Tranter publishes an eclectic selection of U.S.-Australian poetry, poetry criticism, and interviews, with recent Loy, Spicer, O'Hara, and Barbara Guest features, occasional inquests into the meaning of "postmodernism," and inspired esoterica like the image (in Jacket 9) of "Hiram Bamburger's 1951 'Poetry Machine.'" Jacket is, in my view, cited too often as the "premier" Web journal of contemporary poetry (which is not to detract from its enormous appeal and importance as a project --- rather, merely to caveat against canon formation where it is no more necessary than anywhere else). There is, however, little doubt as to why: Tranter's medium-specific editorial acumen poses a quite serious challenge to Jacket's peers in the print universe.

Mudlark (http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/), ed. William Slaughter. Thirteen semi-annual issues online as of this writing. ("Never in and never out of print" is Mudlark's banner.) Mudlark is Zen to Jacket's catholicism: minimalistic, sparing, and tactically more focused on the subsets of poetry that court prose. Issues are structured as electronic chapbooks, offering substantial selections of work by one or two authors per issue, and "posters" and "flash poems" --- individual poems or short sequences --- appear periodically. Mudlark maintains extensive "A-notes" for its contributors --- hyperlinked biographies that point readers to other work on or offline. Recently featured: Kate Lutzner, Shqipe Malushi, Edward Harkness, Martin Bennett, Richard von Sturmer, Diane Wald, Andrew Schelling, Sheila E. Murphy.

Readme (http://www.jps.net/nada/), ed. Gary Sullivan. At the time of this writing, two gargantuan issues online, offering nine long interviews each, plus essays, reviews, poems, alluring page backgrounds, and issue #1's extended tribute to Daniel Davidson. Working your way through all this material is worth it, if a little rough on the eyes. The same goes for the "20th Century Authors Links" and "Literary Links" sections --- archives of hyperlinks to sites containing information about contemporary writers and publications. The lack of any annotation or provenance for author links (which I assume is planned for the future) makes the index less useful than it could be. (If you can stomach his abuse of the word "conservative," Sullivan's annotations for "Literary Links" are more helpful.) It's Readme's interview sections that are invaluable; these will doubtless form a prized archive, complementing essays and reviews that are often more cogent and extended than most written for Web publication.

Idiom Online (http://www.idiomart.com/), various editors. At the time of this writing, full text of five issues online, plus a recent portfolio of Chris Vitielo's work in visual/iconic and hypertext poetry. An effectively mixed presentation of poetry and work in the visual arts, accompanied by pertinent essays and reviews, plus alternate formats such as issue #4's gallery of work by book/book concept artist Emily McVarish. Idiom's site also includes excerpts from a printed poetry chapbook series and a manifesto that begins, "We have taken it upon ourselves to control the future of poetry."

The Transcendental Friend (http://www.morningred.com/friend/), ed. Garrett Kalleberg. The most eclectic project in this group, TF offers thirteen "quasi-monthly" issues online via a set of idiosyncratic structures that actually work. A strong textualist impulse guides such departments as Kalleberg's "Critical Dictionary," Laird Hunt's "Bestiary," Heather Ramsdell's "Mote," and others ("Dialectic," "Rosetta," "Schizmata"), conceived as "organs" or "books in progress" that thread through the issues non-consistently. The recurrences of non-English texts in (pseudo-) translation and the (pseudo-) recovery of historical oddities (e.g., "Robert de Montesquiou") lend TF its refreshingly gnostic Internet aura. Like Idiom, TF is really an editorial collective; the cross-pollination of multiple projects hatched under one sign is an appealing figure for not-merely-hyped possibilities in the medium.

TheEastVillage.com (http://www.geocities.com/~theeastvillage/), ed. Jack Kimball. EVPW's eighth and most recent issue as of this writing includes audio/video of readings and performances by Wendy Kramer, Alan Sondheim, Lyn Hejinian, and others (whose work appears in text alongside), a selection of work in the visual arts, and poetics statements by Jena Osman, Bob Perelman, and Maria Damon. Special issues have included "Boston 99" (#7), "Video Tokyo" (#6) and "Poetries of Canada" (#4); others have juxtaposed work from (largely) US and Japanese contributors (Kimball edits the site from Kiyotake).

You oughtn't to need any "plug-ins" to visit these sites, which is a statement in itself: and while it's tempting at times to yield wholly to "nextness," it may be more important, in the end, to see these publications in their historical and practical context midway between older print projects and newer, entirely "print-free" ones. Often more interesting than the nextness of new media, to me, are their regressions and transpositions, which reminds us that no two perceptions of a revolution are ever the same. Innovation hype aside, I relish the project of reviewing these sites (nonetheless responsibly, I hope) in print rather than on their "native" Web --- or better yet, at the same time in both, without forcing qualitative distinctions at all. Things may well have been different in the utopian Internet age before the Web, and then again before the Web became an instrument of dot-commerce; yet technological avant-gardism presently runs the risk of watching its favored tropes cross over as descriptors for a "new economy" that is in many ways as complex-chaotic, improvisational, and interdependent (if far from socialistic) as the new innovative poetries and new media artworks flatter themselves to be. All of which is to say not only that the project of intermediary publishing continues to be valid --- like the old media themselves, such "zwischens" or middle zones will be with us for some time to come.

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