David Caplan

Department of English
University of Virginia
dmc8u@virginia.edu

 

The Academy of American Poets’ Web site and the Electronic Poetry Center
 

“Friends?”

 
If, as Blake would have us believe, opposition is true friendship, then some antagonists certainly hide their affection better than others. Consider how the Academy of American Poets introduces itself on its new Web site:

 

The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. The largest organization in the country dedicated specifically to the art of poetry, the Academy sponsors programs nationally. These include National Poetry Month; the most important collection of awards for poetry in the United States; a national series of public poetry readings and residencies; and other programs that provide essential support to American poets, poetry publishers, and readers of poetry.

 

Now consider how Charles Bernstein, the poet and Executive Editor and co-founder of SUNY Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center, describes the same organization (which he mistakenly refers to as the “American Academy of Poetry”):

 

Finally, there are the self-appointed keepers of the gate who actively put forward biased, narrowly focused and frequently shrill and contentious accounts of American poetry, while claiming, like all disinformation propaganda, to be giving historical or nonpartisan views. In this category, the American Academy of Poetry and such books as The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing stand out. (248)

 

Since Bernstein’s memorable attack, his poetry and criticism have gone, to use Alan Golding’s phrase, “from outlaw to classic.” Appointed the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at SUNY Buffalo, Bernstein faces the obvious charge that he has been co-opted by “the official verse culture” he condemns. In an ironic contrast, the sexagenarian Academy of American Poets finds itself a mere babe on the Internet. Opened in April to coincide with the second Annual National Poetry Month, the organization’s Web site faces comparisons and, to a certain degree, competition with the much better established Electronic Poetry Center. As if according to some New Age prophecy, the old have been made young, and the outcast reborn as Executive Editor.

 

Given such a background, the two sites might be said to offer an old fashioned war-of-words writ electronic, a continuation of poems and poetics by other means. Like the groups and figures behind them, both sites also must face the larger challenge of trying to find a place for poetry in the American public sphere. A skeptic might quip that the art can claim a National Poetry Month but not a national audience, while others offer anecdotal evidence in support of their hope that reports of poetry’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Regardless of which view is more accurate–and, frankly, who knows?–the Electronic Poetry Center and the Academy of American Poets’ Web site offer noteworthy models of how technology might allow what are often called “mainstream” and “oppositional” or “outsider” poetries to sustain themselves in an age of such insistent pulse checking. Among the questions, then, that I will consider are: what kind of poetries do the Web sites promote, and to what extent do they exploit or fail to appreciate the new interpretive, archival, and critical possibilities that the electronic age offers?

 

“Not Here For Years”

 

As a man said to me, we were buying
fruit on Seventh Avenue, I know you by
your picture, you are the lady who has
not been here for thirty one years.
	    --Gertrude Stein
	      How Writing is Written (67)

 

In late March the Academy of American Poets released a press statement announcing it would establish a Web site. Run on the wire services, the story made several newspapers’ gossip pages, along with the news that Steven Spielberg had cast a former Supreme Court Justice to play the role of a Supreme Court Justice and Barbara Streisand had missed Celine Dion’s performance of Streisand’s academy-nominated song, “I Finally Found Someone,” because of “an ill-timed trip to the restroom.” Awarding the Academy’s efforts equal respect as Babs’ faux pas and the Jurist’s well-rehearsed cameo, the Boston Globe reported:

 

Quoting T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, the Academy of American Poets has announced it's going on line. Academy executive director Bill Wadsworth said this week that the academy will launch "the most comprehensive and lively poetry site on the World Wide Web" April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month. Browsers who key in www.poets.org will find "an oasis for wisdom in an age of information...a place to read, learn, and discover," Wadsworth said.

 

To have good press releases, you need unblushing self-promotion. However, Wadsworth’s superlatives interest me less than the first boast it qualifies: his claim that the Academy’s Web site will be “comprehensive”–and, by implication, certainly not “biased, narrowly focused” as Bernstein characterizes the Academy’s previous accounts of American poetry. And why not? After all, greater comprehensiveness is one of the chief virtues ascribed to the Internet. While print-based discussions of poetry are literally bound by the technological and cultural limits of how much material can be held together in a marketable package, the electronic form, at least in theory, promises to expand radically these parameters. A future when The Best American Poetry has been supplanted by on-line anthologies of all poems published or just submitted that year–such is the stuff hypertext dreams are made of.

 

So is the Academy’s Web site “comprehensive?” In one important respect, a qualified yes. Like many poetry Web sites, this one runs a discussion forum. What’s admirable about this discussion is not what’s being said but who is saying it. Although most contributors to the list did not identify their professions, among those who did were a technical editor in the aerospace industry, a NASA employee, and an elementary school librarian. It is a national and cultural disgrace that so few public forums exist in America for those who live outside of urban centers and university towns and want to discuss poetry. As one of the select poetry organizations capable of getting a press release onto the wire services, the Academy performs a valuable service by helping these people–and interested others–come together to talk about poetry.

 

Sadly, though, there doesn’t seem much to talk about, at least not yet. By mid-June, the two most popular topics for general discussion drew only nine e-mails apiece, most brief and tentative. As newcomers to the already crowded Internet, the group might just need a little more time to attract new participants. However, the awkward trickle of replies suggests the larger challenge of launching an electronic discussion group, even a well-publicized one. The Academy admirably invites “anyone with an interest in literature” to participate; but poetry as a whole, let alone literature, offers an impossibly wide topic for conversation. Although poetry might be what the neighbors don’t want to talk about, interested parties need a more manageable set of shared interests and texts–a canon, one might say, if that term were not too busy doing penance for New Critical sins. Put simply, the strangers who make up the discussion group share a desire to talk but not yet a subject.

 

In addition to the discussion group, the Web site currently features recordings of poets reading their work, three historical exhibits–on Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and British poetry–and four thematic exhibits on poems about ancestry, love, grief, and work.

 

While the discussion group is, at least so far, a noble failure, the historical poetry exhibits are reprehensibly, perhaps even defiantly, inadequate. Here is “The Modernist Revolution” on Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams (with links to biographical sketches):

 

What was new in Marianne Moore was her brilliant and utterly original use of quotations in her poetry, and her surpassing attention to the poetic image. What was new in E.E. Cummings was right on the surface, where all the words in lower-case letters and a parenthesis "(a leaf falls)" may separate "l" from "oneliness." William Carlos Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can read," to use a phrase of Marianne Moore. "No ideas but in things," he proclaimed. In succinct, often witty poems he presents common objects or events--a red wheelbarrow, a woman eating plums--with freshness and immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem's subject matter might be.

 

As the saying goes, you could write a book about what the Academy has left out–indeed, the many authors of books on these three poets and Modernism in general have done exactly that. Given such rich resources, the editorial choices behind “The Modernist Revolution” leave me baffled. Why does the Web site never cite a single critical study, prose appreciation, interview, or biography? Why does it not offer an annotated bibliography and some essays for those who want more than a brief half paragraph on Williams and a single sentence on Moore and on cummings? In short, why doesn’t it take advantage of the Internet’s capabilities for expansiveness? Poetry without literary criticism except in baby-sized bites–is this what “comprehensive” means?

 

By limiting itself to one-page synopses of major historical movements, the Academy perhaps invites scorn from pointy heads like me who don’t like to see their favorite poets reduced to caricatures. However, to say the Web site presents a dumbed-down version of Modernism does not do justice to the consistency of its editorial choices. Instead, it is more accurate to say that “The Modernist Revolution” offers Modernism Without Too Much Revolution. I return to the last sentence of the passage I just quoted because it is so frustratingly representative: “In succinct, often witty poems he [Williams] presents common objects or events–a red wheelbarrow, a woman eating plums–with freshness and immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem’s subject matter might be.” If Williams could log in, he would be less than thrilled to read that his main contribution to literature is to make the world safe for the late confessional short lyric–or, as it is more often called, the workshop poem. According to Academy, Williams should be celebrated for “common objects or events” vividly presented. But didn’t Williams more crucially enlarge our understanding of what a poem’s form might be? To borrow a phrase from another Modernist, the Academy seems to have had the experience but missed the meaning. Take the example of one of Williams’ two poems that “The Modernist Revolution” cites, “To a Poor Old Woman.” The poem famously declares:

 

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her. (383)

 

If the main point of these lines is their subject matter, then they are overly repetitious and poorly punctuated. Instead, this stanza can be more accurately called a demonstration of what poetic form can do. Line breaks suggest inflection which, in turn, act far more ambitiously than as the mere exposition of subject matter. In particular, the slow, extended consideration of the statement, “They taste good to her,” proceeds with the hesitant, sensuous pleasure of the imagination at work. The poem may be titled “To an Old Woman” but it is less about her than the formal pleasures the imagination allows the poet to experience, or, as Williams wrote in Spring and All,

 

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation. Invention of new forms to embody this reality of art, the one thing which is, must occupy all serious minds concerned. (198)

 

“The Modernist Revolution,” however, does not mention Spring and All, Williams’ most important book, nor Kora in Hell, his most influential book for writers of prose poems, nor any of Williams’ crucial essays; his most important poem, the five volume “Paterson,” is wildly pruned to the single familiar motto that has become, as Ron Silliman notes, “the battle cry of anti-intellectualism in verse” (660). (Fittingly, the version of “The Red Wheelbarrow” that the Academy refers to is the anthology piece of Selected Poems, not the untitled prose and verse meditations of Spring and All.)

 

What’s excluded is the “other” Williams that, among others, Bernstein, Silliman, Marjorie Perloff, Hank Lazer, and Eliot Weinberger have written about. While it is undeniable that Williams’ “succinct, often witty poems” form part of his work’s legacy, the Academy’s sin is that of the funhouse mirror which distorts one arm into an entire body. Captured in such unforgiving glass, Williams becomes, like Moore, less a groundbreaking experimenter than a rather unambitious Imagist.

 

Although no single figure can sum up what’s missing from “The Modernist Revolution,” one comes close: Gertrude Stein. Her name appears once, without any elaboration, in a list of several early twentieth-century artists in painting, music, architecture, and literature. Again, the Academy remains true to its prejudices. Stein is not an Imagist; her work is not “conventional”; it may be wildly influential, but not, evidently, to those poets whom the Academy considers to be important.

 

With characteristic shrewdness Stein once wrote, “A very bad painter once said to a very great painter, ‘Do what you like, you cannot get rid of the fact that we are contemporaries.’ That is what goes on in writing” (151). A historical exhibit should remind us of exactly whom history cast as contemporaries: Gertrude Stein and Robert Frost, born during the same year, William Rose Benét, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams, together for a wildly anticipated joint poetry reading, and the young Yvor Winters, who hailed Loy as one of the greatest poets of her generation and Williams as a potential prophet. Although Modernist poetry contains multitudes, the Academy, failing to exploit the Internet’s archival resources, presents it as the work of seven men and two women.

 

As the Academy’s Web site makes perfectly clear, the argument over Modernism neither stops nor starts with Williams, Stein, Pound, Eliot, et al. Rather, where we think we have been tells us where we need to go. As if to prove this point, the Web site lists the poets its exhibits feature or will feature. Not one of these poets is associated with either Language Poetry or New Formalism, the two movements which, during the last two decades, have posed the noisiest challenges to late confessional poetics. Although individual readers may prefer the work of one group to the other, no literary history of contemporary American poetry is complete without at least considering these movements and their implications. The Academy does not. The omissions of the past become the omissions of the present and, it seems safe to predict, of the future.

 

“a group poem/renga/range of affection”

 

It all depends on what you call profound.
	    --William Carlos Williams
	      The Autobiography (390)

 

Soon after Allen Ginsberg’s death on April fifth of this year, the Electronic Poetry Center began to memorialize him with an exhibit, “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),” a collection of e-mail exchanges from Poetics, the poetry discussion linked to the Electronic Poetry Center. Written on April 4, the first post came from Charles Bernstein:

 

Allen Ginsberg has been diagnosed with liver cancer and is not given much more time to live. There are articles about his illness in today's New York Post and Philadelphia Inquirer. I would imagine everyone reading this will have the same intense reaction I am having. It seems like Allen Ginsberg has been with me all my life.

 

What follows is extraordinary. In forty-four postings over the period of two days, the respondents offer sometimes painfully intimate tributes to Ginsberg’s profound influence on their lives. After one contributor asks, “shall we write a group poem/renga/range of affection for allen ginsberg?” a group poem begins, with each line composed by a different writer. At one point the poem reads:

 

pull my daisy, poet
Happening to notice the willow leaves in the garden, a
		braille page of words
the wind a simultaneous translation
the sorority girls sing of fucking in a plaintive way
nothing has happened, no one has died

 

“nothing has happened, no one has died”: if this line were to appear without any further explanation in the pages of, say, The Paris Review, the best adjectives to apply to it might be “artful,” “elegiac,” and “nicely understated.” Read in the context of “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),” it is a wish poignantly pretending to be a fact. As the heading attests, the e-mail was written on Friday, April fourth, at eleven eighteen p.m. By then, although Ginsberg was still alive, the something that had happened was the certainty that he soon would die.

 

The closest analogy I can think of for “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)” is a condolence book at a funeral, another written record of a social mourning. However, the Poetics’ exchanges take place in the notoriously cool medium of electronic mail; the mourners are not gathered in some funeral home parlor but seated before their terminals, in some cases separated by thousands of miles. A few months later, what they wrote while waiting for a poet they loved to die forms a precisely dated chronology–equal parts consolation, catharsis, and homage: an oddly pre-Modernist elegy written according to e-mail conventions.

 

“Allen Ginsberg: 1926-1997” displays the Poetics List and perhaps even the electronic discussion format itself at its best. While technological efficiency allows discussion to proceed almost in real time, this conversation never would have taken place at all without cultural and human necessity: the absence of equally attractive venues coupled with the knowledge that the other contributors would share, as Bernstein wrote, “the same intense reaction I am having.” To lament that such social mourning can take place only through e-mail is to miss the larger point of what was accomplished. Instead, it seems more accurate to say that “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)” presents a hopeful vision of the kind of public spaces technology can help create, even within a culture that often frowns upon or trivializes such displays of grief. More particularly, the ensuing conversation’s tone, so intimate that, at times, it almost verges on the exhibitionistic, seems wholly appropriate for eulogizing Ginsberg. The author of “Kaddish” and “White Shroud” would appreciate, I believe, the emotional paradoxes inherent in declaring over the Internet, as several contributors did, that they have broken down in tears.

 

“Our aim is simple,” the Electronic Poetry Center’s welcome cheerfully declares, “to make a wide range of resources centered on contemporary experimental and formally innovative poetries an immediate actuality.” While this clearly defined sense of purpose makes possible discussions such as “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),” it also fuels more common and less productive exchanges. De rigueur for discussion are quick dismissals of poems that do not neatly fulfill the group’s definitions of “experimentally and formally innovative,” as if nothing can be learned from writing that differs from your favorites. Conspiracy theories also abound–but just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean someone is after you.

 

A few months after Ginsberg’s death, the Electronic Poetry Center moved “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)” to a permanent exhibit of what it calls obituaries. The introductory link’s new displays include a letter from Jackson Mac Low, in which he discusses the differences between his work and John Cage’s. The reader whom the Academy’s Web site would envision might reasonably ask, “John Cage–do you mean the composer? And who is this Jackson Mac Low?” Indeed, to go from the Academy’s Web site to the Electronic Poetry Center is akin to taking a winter flight from Bangor to Key West. The fact that no passports are checked confirms that we have not left the country, but everything else–the climate, landscape, culture, even the air itself–seems wholly different.

 

As I mentioned before, the Academy’s Web site conspicuously ignores poets associated with Language Poetry. In turn the Center unkindly repays the favor. Only a half-dozen poets make both the Academy’s and the Center’s lists of featured authors, while nearly two hundred names appear only on one. The Center offers Rae Armantrout to the Academy’s W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett to John Berryman, Robert Creeley to Lucille Clifton, and so on.

 

“Is anything central?” John Ashbery, the one living author whom both lists share, famously asks in “The One Thing That Can Save America.” After several reformulations of the question, the poem ends with a vision of a suburban present morphing into the future:

 

Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady
streets. (45)

 

Twenty years later, these households are still fenced (now electronically); they also have bought satellite dishes and gone on-line. What, if anything, is central to this later version of the culture Ashbery depicts–the town or university library, or its Barnes & Noble? The M.T.V. its teenagers watch obsessively, Martha Stewart’s latest cookbook, or the web its college students spend their nights surfing, home for a long weekend and already bored?

 

Out-doing Yeats, Ashbery turns his and my questions into rhetorical ones. For him, the idea of the center cannot hold because there can be no one center but various centralities. This, I believe, is the best way to understand both the Electronic Poetry Center and its relation to the larger poetic community. The Center’s Mission Statement declares its role to be compensatory, offering alternative routes of distribution to what the “mainstream” ignores: “Our aim is to provide access to [the] generous range of writing which mainstream bookstores, publishers, and, increasingly, libraries are unable or unwilling to make available.” To this end, the Center offers fairly extensive information about small presses and publishers, and the kind of experimental poetry you cannot find in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

 

To call the Center out of the “mainstream,” however, is to overlook the issue of which stream we are talking about. Such monolithic distinctions are not very helpful, even when applied only to the limited topic of elite, print-based discussions of poetry. Is The New York Times central–or PMLA? For example, any reasonable account would place in the poetry mainstream Anthony Hecht, the much honored Academy Chancellor Emeritus. Published by Knopf, Harvard University Press, and Princeton University Press, the four new books of poetry and criticism that Hecht produced during the nineties benefitted not only from his reputation but from the impressive publicity and distribution resources of these prestigious publishing houses. Predictably, all five books were reviewed in the literary journals and newspapers that assiduously ignored the work of poets such as Charles Bernstein. Yet a few minutes with the Arts and Humanities Citation Index confirms that, during 1994-1997, the number of academic citations for Bernstein’s work doubled those for Hecht’s. As this statistic suggests, the poetry that university poetry presses and book reviews chart as “mainstream” looks more like a mudflat to many literary critics–and, as The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Yardley reminds his readers almost weekly, vice versa.

 

More to the point of this review, the Electronic Poetry Center dramatizes the differences between the kinds of poems and poetics central to the web and print-based cultures. While scholarly citation marks academic respect, the number of hits a Web site receives suggests the electronic community’s view of whether or not that site is literally worth looking at. In April, 1997, the month Allen Ginsberg died and the Academy’s site opened its electronic doors, the Center’s root directory recorded 151,200 transactions. Including both the multiple hits of a single user roaming through the Center and the use of background graphic files, this imprecise figure of course can be analyzed in innumerable ways. Its import, however, is rather self-evident: to many, many poetry enthusiasts, the Center seems the place to be. No matter how you crunch them, 151,200 hits can’t be wrong.

 

Why? What these raw numbers hint at is an unquantifiable sense that, while the Academy gives the appearance of going on-line because everyone else has, the Center addresses an otherwise unsatisfied need. Reading the poems that the Academy’s Web site feature is often a depressing aesthetic experience because the poems lose the immediacy of a book held in your hands yet gain so very little. An Auden poem converted into HTML mark-up and typed onto the screen looks like, well, an Auden poem converted into HTML mark-up and typed onto the screen. Even if the Academy’s Web site were to focus on typographical poems such as Hecht’s “The Gardens of the Villa d’Este,” John Hollander’s heart-shaped “Crise de Coeur” or star-shaped “Graven Image,” the resulting exhibit would just emphasize that, to its credit, such verse works best on the page, the canvas for which it was originally painted. However, to look at the Center’s visually stunning gallery of poems is to appreciate the affinities between a kind of hypertext and what the Center calls “experimental and formally innovative” poetics. Bernstein’s on-line visual work, “Veil,” sends a reader back to his earlier book of the same name. Published in 1986 by Xexoxial Editions, a small press in Madison, Wisconsin, Veil, the book, overlays typescript lines of sometimes grainy, indecipherable words upon each other. Constructed in the nineties, “Veil,” the hypertext poem, offers digital words, shapes and colors similarly overlaid over each other. In short, while both works profoundly engage the resources of their chosen medium, it is easy to see how the experiments of one would lead to the other. This likeness does not stop with the poetry the Center has put on-line. Instead, to re-read Cage’s and Mac Low’s “reading through” and “writing through” of source texts, Johanna Drucker’s visual poetry, or any of a number of other print-based works written before the Internet boom is to see how they were–and, in most cases, still are–hypertexts waiting to happen.

 

Recognizing these similarities between hypertext and verse poetics, the Center does not segregate poetry from literary theory, criticism, and hypertext scholarship, as the Academy’s Web site does. As a consequence, a viewer can go from an on-line version of “Tender Buttons,” to bibliographies of Mina Loy’s works and criticism on them, to Marjorie Perloff’s home page, then end with Christopher Funkhouser’s provocative essay, “Hypertext and Poetry,” in which he claims, “Technology is just catching up to what progressive minds have been doing across atomic-atomicized decades.”

 

At moments like these, the Center swaggers a bit with the self-assurance of someone doing something important. “The future is watching,” it all but crows to anyone who’ll listen. Acting on this hope, the Poetics List archives all of its e-mails, not just those from the last ninety-nine days, as the Academy does. Such confidence belies the Center’s claim that its role is secondary, providing an alternative to the more powerful “official verse culture.” Instead, the aptly named Electronic Poetry Center gives every indication of believing that the poetics it promotes are, and will continue to be, central to any understanding of late twentieth-century poetry and poetic theory.

 

Word processors are to postmodernism what the typewriter was to modernism, Fredric Jameson once declared, neatly conjuring a wide range of familiar assumptions (quoted in Public Access 125). Yet whole shelves of learned books remind us how recently equally heady claims were made for psychoanalysis, LSD, even the Ouija board. However, if Jameson’s prediction turns out to be right, or at least more right than wrong, then the next generation of literary scholars are likely to see much of the Center’s cockiness as rather charming self-assurance and remember the Academy in the same vein as Lascelles Abercrombie, the Georgian poet best known for provoking Ezra Pound into challenging him to a duel.

 

“You Can Get There from Here”

 

“The possibilities for poetry’s writing in electronic space are to be reckoned,” Loss Pequeño Glazier, the director of the Center, wrote in a recent issue of Postmodern Culture. “What will happen? Will it be milk and honey or virtual Balkans?”

 

So far I have proposed the latter possibility, with imagery that stresses opposition, competition, even dueling. “Both,” however, is the better answer to Glazer’s second question. The literary histories that the Web sites present are mutually exclusive; the Web sites themselves are not. Significantly, each offers links to the other. Like the group poem at the heart of “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),” this cooperation is less the taste of milk and honey than a reminder that the electronic landscape is, at least so far, neither essentially cooperative or competitive but a little of both. Instead, the poetics that the two sites represent draw what Ashbery would call “juice” from their dance through several mediums; in the electronic landscape, the Center leads and the Academy follows, while, elsewhere, their roles dramatically reverse.

 

Ultimately, what the two sites share is their desire for technology to help poetry not be merely “academic.” To this end, the Academy’s site seeks to bring poetry to readers outside the universities. In this utopia, however, Homer banishes Plato and most other poets, as the Academy deems literary criticism, theory, and a great deal of poetry not worth its consideration. In contrast, the Center, sponsored by a university and peopled by many card-carrying members of the MLA, brings together writers not only of poetry, literary criticism, and theory, but also of hypertext scholarship. Fed with such abundant information, many of the resulting conversations are driven by name-recognition value and clannish attitudes. Even on an afternoon where forty messages deluge each subscriber’s account, a topic suggested by, say, Ron Silliman will not go undiscussed.

 

In this paradoxical, competitively cooperative, and cooperatively competitive electronic landscape, any claim to comprehensiveness is quixotic. However, while the study of poetry suffers from so many professional categories and sub-categories that have little to do with the actual practice of writing and reading, hyperspace’s eternal delight is the energy of feuding poets, critics, flame wars, and scholarship gathered together, sometimes despite themselves, into a dream of what comprehensiveness might be.

 

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*I’d like to thank Matt Kirschenbaum and Gena McKinley for conversations about poetry and the Internet, and Charles Bernstein for answering my questions about the Center.

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Works Cited

 

• The Academy of American Poets. “The Modernist Revolution.” April 1 1997. www.poets.org.
• Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
• Bernstein, Charles.Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975-1984. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986.
• Bérubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. New York: Verso, 1994.
• Dezell, Maureen. “Poets Spin a Web.” The Boston Globe. 28 March 1997: F2.
• The Electronic Poetry Center. “Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997).” 1994. wings.buffalo.edu/epc.
• Funkhouser, Chris. “Hypertext and Poetry.” The Electronic Poetry Center. wings.buffalo.edu/epc.
• Glazier, Loss Pequeño, “Jumping to Occlusions.” Postmodern Culture. 7.3 (May, 1997).
• Silliman, Ron. “Of Theory, To Practice.” Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Ed. Paul Hoover. New York: Norton, 1994.
• Stein, Gertrude. How Writing is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlet Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974.
• Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1948.
• —. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I 1909-1039. Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: Directions, 1986.