My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

WAR N I N G - POE TRY ARE A 309
links to all their electronically available poems and essays. A related project
is Riflt, an electronic poetry magazine that has 1,000 subscribers. As to
the EPe, the number of hits per month has been increasing: we estimate,
for 1994, something over 500 "root" connections per month and about
3,600 requests per month for all EPe subdirectories. Some of these requests
may be the same user going back for more; at the same time the statistics
do not account for all modes of access to the EPe, so the number of total
requests is actually higher. In any case, over 500 hits in one month compares
favorably to the public for an established literary magazine. 3 Luigi-Bob
Drake's Taproot magazine is also available on line. The hard copy version of
the magazine has a print run of about 2,500, of which 500 are distributed
free in Cleveland, its home base. The e-mail version goes out directly to 500
subscribers and is also redistributed to an additional 1,000 e-mail accounts
as part of FactSheet5 Electric, which in tum is available from over 20 archive
and gopher sites with undetermined additional "hits". Taproot itself is also
available via the EPe.
More startling, and more informative as to the potential for electronic
distribution of "literary-niche" audience material, is the incredible success
of the electronic journal Postmodern Culture. According to co-editor John
Unsworth, in the approximately six-month period from May 18, 1994, to
December 8, 1994, there were over 40,000 requests for the table of contents
of all issues of the journal. In total, more than 358,000 items have
been requested from the PMC archives during this same period.4
Poetry on the net is not so much a positive development as a necessary
one. The Internet will become increasingly central for poetry because of
the economy of scale it provides, given the high cost of printing and paper,
3. EPe root connections through the main menu are as follows: July 1994,614; September,
367; October, 429; November, 573; January 1995, 1,079; February, 1,283. Projected total connections
to all menu items are higher: January, 6,798; February, 8,083. Perhaps an additional 10
percent accessed the server through Veronica searches or direct gopher connections. [For April
1997 total requests for EPe pages numbered 67,698; for March 1998, total requests numbered
approximately 200,000. Of course, a single user requests many flies during one visit to the EPe,
and, for technical reasons, other users may not be counted.]
4. "The WAIS-based search function for PMC. which operates through a WWW fill-out form,
is heavily used, with more than 6,000 requests for that. The table of contents for the May 1994
issue (our most popular recent issue) has been requested over 6,000 times. Our most popular single
item has been the popular culture column on Krazy Kat, with roughly 2,500 requests for the
opening page. By the way, the page of information and archives on PMC-MOO has been
requested almost as many times (5,700+). PMC-MOO is now the second largest virtual community
on the internet, with 2,718 'citizens', over half of whom have been active on the MOO
in the two weeks (prior to this tabulation). And we've had close to 900 requests for the table of
contents of the PMC book of collected essays. [ should add that none of these numbers reflect
the non-WWW distribution channels; [ don't have stats for gopher or ftp use, but we do have
over 3,000 subscribers to the listserv distribution list for the journal's table of contents and calls
for reviewers" (John Unsworth, personal communication, January 31, 1995).