[Newspoetry] happy birthday to me!

[William Gillespie]

Hey everyone! I'm writing to say hello from Providence. Right now I 
need newspoetry more than ever, immersed in what threatens to be a 
perfectly apolitical MFA track. In an otherwise extremely solid 
Creative Writing program for poetry/fiction/drama, I am a little less 
than half of the not-completely-popular-among-administrators Electronic 
Writing department. No professors, just me and Talan Memmott 
(http://www.memmott.org/talan/index.html) making up the tradition as we 
go along. I ain't complainin' though. No more sonnets about my dreary 
dayjob from me, not for a few months anyway. It would be nice to have 
some in-your-face Newspoetry to show, the staggering massively 
collaborative electro-gas of the past Millennium, running the gamut 
from amateurish to profane to formally unclassifiable to $80/hr quality 
CGI scripting, and always about something we wouldn't otherwise be 
writing about.

Where is it? Our bumper sticker is a dead link. Can we get our website 
back? If not the dot com maybe the dot net? Any way I can help?  I'm 
dying here. I tried to pick up the Providence Journal and it was like 
being smacked; right next to a picture of Mars was the article about 
how Bush cut a bunch of air pollution regulations. I can already feel 
those corporate savings being passed back to the consumer. In the form 
of carcinogens. Acid rain = trickle-down economics.

I'm lonely. My new neighborhood is weird. Here's a description of my 
street written by me and Lorien Carsey and transcribed here for your 
reading pleasure:

Thayer Street 8-24-03

Motorcycle Street is relatively tame on a Sunday night, but still a 
carnival. Bikers sit atop parked bikes, a row of perhaps 100 shining 
motorcycles. They seldom ride them but when they do they do their best 
to top 100 Dbs, at about 10 MPH. I am entranced by the "big city" look 
to Thayer - complete with punks, hippies, and Britneys. Into what 
category of real life does this place belong? A schizophrenic urban 
setting so diverse as to be almost characterless, with a certain 
modicum of action: minor hustlers, amateur musicians, hemp jewelry 
merchants, lots of eating and surprisingly little drinking. Loitering 
of all kinds, kids sitting on curbs, clean sober guys in leather Harley 
Davidson vests admiring each other's chrome, hippies sitting against 
the fronts of closed stores, incense peddlers, people hawking pages 
ripped from psychedelic sketchbooks, etcetera. A couple of 
classy-looking restaurants with three-syllable names and elegant 
awnings offer outdoor seating - tables set up blocking busy sidewalks 
that channel a constant jostling stream of pedestrians, dogs, 
motorcycles, strollers, and a few genuine weirdos, like the white 
bearded guy with shorts and suspenders who would appear innocuous save 
for the fact that you will see him walk past you ten times an hour if 
you sit still, up and down and up and down, or the black guy with 
studded face and sunglasses, always dancing to himself curbside as 
though waiting for a bus. Citywide renovation has provided funds to 
provide these people with headphones, so it appears as though they are 
preoccupied with music instead of the voices in their heads.

Love,
William

P.S. The mayor of Providence is in jail. We need something like that in 
Urbana. Or maybe Champaign.