Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

it. Despite his amusing dismissal of what would later become an important
element of his teaching and practice, in a sense he was right. Greatly
misunderstood is the fact that for all the ubiquitous deployment of energydependent,
"non-physical" (virtual?) mental furniture, the internet is really an
extension of corporeality, much like media we’ve grown accustomed to in the
last century. Soon it will be hard to remember what it was like before e-mail–
even further, we are the last generation for whom that is even possible. And
discussion groups are another matter entirely. It was at the prospective meeting
of younger writers, the now-infamous conference, "Writing from the New
Coast," held at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the Spring of
1993, where I first heard of the world of electronic discussion groups, even
though electronic communities such as The Well had existed for years. Joe
Amato, one of the heralds of this strange new world, was passing out flyers
announcing his "Nous Refuse" electronic community. There was something
ministerial about his advocacy. What kind of community would this be? Would
it be an extension of the conference, or more like a party-line, what would
come to be known as a "chatroom"?
For many of us the Poetics List was our first encounter with e-mail and we
were quick to put it to good use as a form of social architecture. The Poetics
List provided the means to continue gatherings and conferences, such as the
New Coast, a way to extend the opportunity to be involved to those who could
not travel to the urban centers or difficult to reach places where such events
usually take place. It provided the opportunity to speed up exchanges that
would otherwise take months through the mail, to meet and correspond with
individuals and large groups, and to listen in on or contribute to public debates
usually reserved for those on conference panels. I saw it as a sort of anarchic
meeting hall, a way to facilitate a kind of continuously running newsletter, a
communitarian study of the contemporary. If it was decentered it was also a
dispersed centeredness. Even the metaphorical name for the early discussion
groups–bulletin boards–demonstrated how we perceived the place of that
technology: at the center of a public space accessed individually. And if a
member of congress can stand up and address an empty chamber on a Friday
night, simply for the benefit of the cameras, certainly we can see the logic
behind a midnight meeting of poets, talking their trade. Like the democracy of
the witness in a meeting house, the bulletin board metaphor is only a cipher for
that early optimism about this medium, which I shared. The optimistic manner
of the public debate in some of the earliest exchanges on the Poetics List, even
early interventions and dogfights typical of discussion groups, reflected the
general euphoria about the redefinition of community that was underway.
Hopefully Poetics@ carries some of the spirit of that time.