CONTACT WITH POETS

writing would automatically know that it was okay. I’d want to know
about it simply because I’d want to know about it, but it didn’t really cross
my mind that anybody might be slowed down or discouraged by my not
making that opportunity explicit.
That said, my next project (a sampling of which was recently
published by your No Press) has been registered with Creative Commons
to formalize its stand against the policies and machinations of the Facebook
corporation. That project, working under the running title of Exquisite
Corp, emerged from a simultaneous disgust with the privacy policies
of the Facebook corporation and with witnessing the illegal police activities
in Toronto during the G8/G20 rallies. The thing that struck me about
both of those events—both of which erode privacy and citizenship—is
that they are encoded with a banality, as if we’ve all grown accommodated
to such impingements. Creative Commons and the Copyleft movement is
part of the development of a third way that is an alternative to the eternal
stalemate of either being inside the system and changed by it or else outside
the system and irrelevant to it. I am always looking for new ways of
sharing language and ideas without contradicting the openness of language.
The use of explicitly already-written language in plunderverse or
appropriative language to speak or to write seems to access an alternative
and new solution to this problem. Language works within a system that
constantly recycles shared words, even ideas and feelings, but the system
falters when somebody attempts to arrest the flow. The problem, as Derrida
outlined a while ago, is fundamental to language and makes our proprietary
rules on language-use absurd: “There would be no cause for concern
if one were rigorously assured of being able to distinguish with rigor
between a citation and a non-citation.” I think we cite in academic papers
because the identity of the authors and the history of the specific texts
(including such editorial backroom mechanics as editions, versions, trans-
110