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POETICS@, Edited by Joel Kuszai Preface Above the world-weary horizons New obstacles for exchange arise Or unfold, O ye postmasters! The Poetics List was founded in late 1993 with this epigraph serving as its first message. I had been on email for only about a year at that time, but from the first was fascinated by the possibilities for group exchange made available by the listserve format. I remember endless conversations with friends explaining the mechanism: you send out one message to the list address and everyone subscribed gets the message almost instantaneously. And to reply, you simply hit "R" on the keypad and write your new message. My friends listened in something as close to astonishment as poets doing hard-time ever can. It was as if I were explaining the marvels of xerography to letterpress printers. In 1993, most of the poets I knew who had email had those accounts provided by universities and the history of the Poetics List is marked by the change, within a few years, from the dominance of ".edu" (university) email addresses to ".com" (commercial) addresses. At that time, writing email was far more cumbersome than it is today. For the first several years of the Poetics List, most of the messages were written on-line using early versions of Pine or more primitive mail programs, with very limited editing tools available. Typing could be slow and the possibility of revision was limited - especially for those who chose to engage in the spirit of improvised list exchange by spontaneously typing their messages and immediately sending them out. Indeed, it is worth noting that a number of people on the list, working with email systems that had no text buffers, could not retype the lines prior to the one they were typing – making a post to Poetics more like a telegram than a letter. And indeed it was the telegraphic immediacy of this new writing genre that was so electrifying. Group exchange of texts had never been faster or easier. Initially, I was amazed at how close the Poetics List mimed "live" exchanges in bars, cafes, readings, and apartments that so characterize the social environment of poetry. It was all here: the quick dismissals and the brilliant précis, the idle chat and the meticulous scholarship, the silly and the self- important, the smug arrogance and startling generosity, the noise and music. I never imagined that there could be a textual equivalent of the temporary and "in the air" exchange among poets that literally surround, and provides crucial contexts for, individual poems. Thanks to the Internet, the intensities of day-to- day poetry conversation, previously restricted to a few urban centers, were now available to a far more geographically diffuse group; indeed, poets living in those urban centers have been the least likely to participate in the Poetics List, possibly because of the many "live" alternatives available to them. The Poetics List is not, of course, just a U.S. or North American phenomenon, but it should be acknowledged that, in terms of content and participation, the Poetics List is U.S.-centered. Nonetheless, the international access to the list is one of its fundamental dynamics and it offers something uniquely useful to those living particularly far from its geographic center, since for such participants, the information and discussion that the list provides would be virtually impossible to find elsewhere. At the same time, the list has allowed a greater amount of exchange among English-writing poets in the U.K., Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the U.S. than previously had been common. One of the central features of the Poetics List is the exchange of small and independent press information as well as announcements of poetry readings. Distribution remains one of the most difficult aspects of poetry book and magazine publishing; the list has provided an ideal site for publicizing, selling, and indeed giving away such publications. Over time, as more and more poetry emerged on the web, the list also became a prime site for announcements about web publications. Although such announcements are not included in this collection, the fact that the discussions presented here were accompanied by such information is a crucial frame. Listserves like Poetics have inaugurated a new genre of writing that is a cross between letters and essays. Most of the pieces of this book were quickly typed prose improvisations that should not be mistaken for carefully revised articles. The unedited quality of the originals has been retained for this collection: enjoy the writing for what it is, keeping in mind the informal setting of the list environment. The Poetics List, while committed to openness, has always been a private list with an articulated editorial focus and a restricted format. Initially, the Poetics List had about 150 subscribers and it has continued to grow to its present level of 750 subscribers. Because of the vastness of the Internet, I tried to make the list available primarily to those for whom it would be of greatest interest, realizing that the broader and more diffuse its participants, and the more voluminous its posts, the less valuable it would be a core group of poets and critics and readers who might be reluctant to stick with highly generalized or elementary discussion - whether on how to write poems or how to get published. The trick is to keep those who been around the block one time too many while entertaining the urgent concerns of those who just found out the block exists, perhaps because it’s not on the standard issue maps. During the first five years of the list, individual posts of participants were sent directly to all subscribers and no one approved any specific post. Nonetheless, the editorial function of the list was promoted, or perhaps better to say cajoled, in other ways, including our editorial statement sent to all new subscribers and posted each month on the list. As I put it in the welcome message: "The definition of this editorial project, while provisional, and while open to continual redefinition by list participants, is nonetheless aversive to a generalized discussion of poetry. Rather, the aim is to support, inform, and extend those directions in poetry that are committed to innovations, renovations, and investigations of form and/or/as content, to the questioning of received forms and styles, and to the creation of the otherwise unimagined, untried, unexpected, improbable, and impossible." Starting in the beginning of 1999, Christopher Alexander became the list moderator and editor; under a new format, subscribers were no longer able to post messages directly to the list. Unfortunately, as the list became bigger and more prominent, it became impossible to continue with unrestricted posting. Simply put, we were too easily open to abuse of the list by those unwilling to work within our stated editorial guidelines. I had made the mistake of holding onto the unrestricted format longer than it was manageable, at the cost of putting in jeopardy what the list, at its best, could achieve. The issue is significant in terms of the Internet as a whole, where endless chatter often produces little in the way of political or aesthetic exchange but, on the contrary, can be understood as a way of defusing or swamping any such possibility. The Poetics List has tried to find a way to enable greater participation in the discussion of the range of poetics to which it is committed. And indeed, since we initiated the moderated format, the size of the list has grown and participation among its subscribers has been more balanced. In one sense, it is not as open as a newsgroup or a chat list because some constraints are put in place. Without these constraints, however, I believe that the range and depth of contributions would be diminished. In the age of the Internet, more editing not less is required. The Poetics List is one part of a much larger Internet project-for-poetry, the Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu), founded and directed by Loss Pequeño Glazier. Full archives of the list, plus of course much more, are available at the EPC. From 1997 to 1998, Joel Kuszai managed the list’s day- to-day operations, while at the same time working on this selection. Anyone who knows the list from its daily manifestations will have a shock reading the substantial and sustained collection of poetics Joel has culled from the far more chaotic "list itself". At this point in time, experiences with lists are common enough not to require a print equivalent of list dynamics; in any case, no print version could adequately reproduce the look and feel of the Poetics list or other long-time active lists. Instead, Joel has picked a set of works important not just for where they were said but for what they are saying. And, tellingly, he has picked a set of texts that are useful to him as a practicing poet and scholar: this is not the "best of" the Poetics List but something even more interesting, a reading of the Poetics List. Other readers would no doubt have followed quite different paths through the wealth of material available. In shaping this selection, from the early years of the list, Joel Kuszai provides a window onto an ongoing, highly articulate, intensely percolating poetics-in-the making that is a fundamental feature of the most engaging and active poetry of our time. If anyone wonders what today’s poets are thinking, what they are concerned about, what they value, this is a good place to start finding out. – Charles Bernstein New York, June, 1999 Introduction In a world where everything is about speed and convenience, where the casual stroll along the boulevard has been replaced by "surfing" at light speed to all reaches of the globe, it is perhaps more important than ever to stop and reflect, consider where we have been.
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