Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

But the "good old days" have passed and perhaps the end of that childlike
optimism is also reflected here. The public sphere of contemporary letters is
both expanded and smothered by a space like the Poetics List. For all the
optimism of the town hall meeting, the discussion list format can become more
like a public soap-opera, with constant need to redress institutional (or
otherwise "public") boundaries. This sometimes sinister theater of immanence,
the spontaneous forum for publication, is part of what makes the Poetics List so
great in conception but often so troublesome and problematic in daily life. The
heightened tendency towards immediate exchange and the ease of the "reply"
function enable both mindless chit-chat and a pandering to argument itself.
While many have advocated that style of discussion list, and certainly there are
plenty of them out there in cyberspace, the sometimes low quality of the
conversation has been a limiting feature of the list, something which has made
"editorial agency a necessary intervention," as one person put it recently.
A collection of writings about topics which I found to be relevant or
representative of something that needed to be heard again, this book does not
attempt to represent the list as a whole. It would be impossible to represent the
play-by-play action on the list in any definitive sense and anyone seeking to
view the historical list in its natural habitat should consult the EPC, where the
complete record of the list’s activity is available to the public. At the same
time, this book is not a "Best of the Poetics List" nor is it going to be the
definitive book based on material from the Poetics List. There will be others
with more specific topics, larger more inclusive books, on-line editions with
much greater volume than the space limitations of this format will allow. One
might imagine a book devoted to particular issues, or presenting the writings
and exchanges of specific individuals. The massive scope of the source material
in the Poetics List archives required that I make decisions from the outset about
what kinds of material to exclude. I have not included any of the kinds of
publication notices, readings, and other announcements of calendar events,
though this feature of the list has been perhaps its greatest attraction. For what I
hope will be obvious reasons, I have also removed, as much as possible, the
daily drama of life on the Poetics List. My conception of this editorial project
also necessitated that I remove the posts from their original occasions,
including dates and e-mail addresses, though I can imagine many reasons for
including them in a similar book. It would be ridiculous to try to catalog all of
the things that I wanted to include but couldn’t. After making an initial cut to a
workable thousand pages, my job suddenly became very difficult.
Working from one of the most complicated and various source texts, my goal
as an editor has been to create a conversation, or series of conversations, out of