Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Louis Cabri
Subject: poetry/prose thinking
The temporal axis of engagement on this listserv virtually guarantees that its
corpus – the prose as much as the poetry – is collaboratively written, whether
acknowledged, and to what degree, or not. I for one have purposely listened-up
for that in posting to the poem. In fact I’d say that a lot of the poem has to do
with how to reflexively acknowledge the collaborative nature of the listserv
itself (and its concerns, and the reading horizons of its various non/participants,
etc). So I am surprised at the unthinking tilt against the listserv’s recent
development, to wit: the ongoing, collaboratively written poem.
Up til now I’ve tried to engage with these prosaic prods by means of adding
lines to versions of the poem. But how can this persistent antagonism toward
the poetry be explained? What does it say about ‘who’ we are when we read,
how we read/think, and what we are reading for (and all this in specific relation
to the communal, processual address permitted by the listserv)? Is it really – it
seems endemic to computer technology, complaints of how slow it is - the
repeated lines that are irksome as some have politely said, or questions of lack
of time, or is it more like a judgement on the quality of the ‘slowed perception’
that the lines require?
These questions are for the poetry contributors as well. What does this decision
mean: of when and what to contribute to the poem, and what and when to
contribute to the prose instead? The semantic content of the prose (e.g. reaching
for facts about…) is in some ways accountable to/by the
institutional/pedagogical context that implicitly lurks ‘beneath’ the listerv (viz.
university addresses appended to contributor names).
Some of these questions, the way I’ve quickly sketched em, may seem to
demand of contributors a ‘self-inquiring’ kind of response, but I do mean them
to be read in more of an objective sense than that.
For subjectively speaking, I could evilly say more than the following about
how I find the prose posts at their worst to be irredeemably complacent,
inertial, phatic, self-regarding, vapidly ‘spontaneous’, substitute television –
just as some of you no doubt could and have said and implied as much about
your reading experience of the poetry. So in other words: this kind of
judgement on quality ain’t an interesting pursuit on these terms – and there