Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

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 dayto-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