[Newspoetry] 2 from Cincinnati

[William Gillespie]

Hey everyone! Here, for those interested, is the text of the brief
introduction to newspoetry I gave at the University of Cincinatti to a
genuinely receptive little crowd of creative writers from high school
students all the way through tenure track faculty. The boldface are
instructions for me on where to click. I flashed a couple of poems on
the screen but the only one that was read aloud was "Electronic
Literature Demonstrates Baffling New Potential" (I think that's what
it's called) (1999) A tip of the hat to Scott for letting me force
newspoetry on those poor people. I think it was good.

....

In 1999, I gave myself the new years resolution to write a poem a day
about events in the news and post them on the World Wide Web, thinking,
then, that if I failed to keep my resolution, the whole world would be
laughing at me. And, as it turned out, I got by with a lot of help from
my freinds, and even a few strangers: a poem a day until Y2K, and the
site continues to offer an original poem each day on topics ranging from
labor issues to our cats.

The site is a growing archive of newspoetry which one can navigate
through a number of indices: authors

1999 - AUTHORS
dates:
1999 - DATES
and forms.
1999 - FORMS -- click on "hypertext"

This list of forms contains a special emphasis on traditional poetic
forms such as the sonnet and haiku, oulipian forms, invented forms, and
electronic forms such as realmedia and animation, and within the
hypertext of the newspoetry site are smaller self-contained hypertext
compositions.

NEWSPOETRY WITCH PROJECT
CHICKEN SOUP FOR YOUR CORPORATE ASS - click through a few pages

Also, the poems are indexed by title:

TITLES 2000 - click on TIME WARNER / AOL SHOVE EACH OTHER UP EACH OTHERS
ASSHOLES

Because the site, while substantial, is inexpensive to maintain, we are
able to do it without corporate backing and even freely adopt, at times,
an anticorporate stance. Also, copyright law and libel and slander law
are currently underdeveloped on the internet, and newspoetry takes full
advantage of that fact.

The Newspoetry mission statement:
1. to be a collaborative ongoing hypertext composition
2. to be an alternative online news source and poetry journal
3. to be a documentary record of the turn of the American millennium
4. to get me to read the damn newspaper

And finally, the Newspoetry project had a function I hadn't anticipated:
it's a pedagogy. Only two newspoets - Dirk and I - are authentic
college-trained poets. And only a few more consider themselves writers.
In short, because of newspoetry, a lot of people - artists, activists,
and programmers - have started writing poetry.

Weirdly, as a reclusive writer working on the web, I accidentally
spawned a community. In truth, at this point I think the newspoetry
listserv, where Newspoets use email to share jokes, ideas, news, and
poems, is actually the work of art - this website is just a sort of
greatest hits album.

 TITLES 1999
 Here's the Omnifesto:
 OMNIFESTO