Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Dick Higgins
Subject: Web Poetry, Restructuring Language Arts Departments
Nice to see the POETICS network’s so quiet. Gives a body time to ruminate
and then say what one has been thinking of. With me it is two things:
1) On the poetics network I would have thought I would see speculations on the
present state of literature instead of this constant assertion that this or that is a
fine book. Try this: we have seen many explanations of the mess in our literary
publishing–high paper costs, poor distribution, a declining economic base of
independent stores, lack of widely read news media coverage, etc. With thirty
million people or so on the web and capable of getting e-mail and the number
growing towards perhaps a quadrupling of that number, e-mail publishing and
e-zines are bound to become a more significant factor than they have been,
since putting up a web site is cheap. Furthermore, many of those who might
otherwise buy books are now buying hardware and software to get onto the
web, so that a downturn in book sales can and must be expected at least short
term, that aggravating an already difficult situation for the serious book-selling
and book-publishing public. We who are "on-line" can access a good site and
print out what we like, thus providing ourselves almost for free with good
reading matter (assuming one does not wish to read on the screen itself).
Leaving aside for now the related questions of how to pay and support the
publisher and writer, one wonders what are some characteristics of works
which function well on the web? For example, time seems to behave differently
in web poems than in on-paper ones. One is impatient to download, one must
read in two stages-do I like this text enough to download it, and now I can see
it, do I want to keep it? I worry about the cost of being connected to my server
(the economic angle), and I can only see one screen-ful at a time. How does
poetic language (including visual-poetic language) function in such a context?
With TTS (="text to sound") becoming ever more sophisticated and less
expensive, therefore more available, the silent web has already begun to be
replaced by the talking web. Already I have been invited to submit poetry by
myself and my Left Hand Books friends to a "poetry reading on the web." If
such a site can be seen in France, Thailand and Brazil, what does this do to the
very concept of national literatures? Is it a form of cultural imperialism or is it a
force for building the world literary community? Or both? What will all this
mean to us as writers, scholars and thinking human beings?