And then went down to the blog...

[Here's the second of my St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter columns about poetry on the internet. It's not quite as giddy as my first one, and not quite as long, but it's equally as uncomprehensive, if not incomprehendible.

The Mini Festival of Digital Poetry went really well, not a technical hitch in the house. A good turnout, about 50 or so, maybe half poets (or at least whom I recognized) and the rest folks I hadn't seen before. I'll be posting pictures and commentary soon. Paul Chan, who does the alternumerics site (see below) seemed to be the crowd favorite.

My first web column for St. Mark's can be found here.

The Days of Our Blogs

So it didn’t appear in 18-point bold-faced type on the NYTimes website, but "Silliman Has a Blog" has managed to change a few minds – mine, for instance – about the possibilities for this website format, once thought strictly the province of public diarists.

(A "blog" – short for weblog – is a site that is easily maintained via an application one downloads for free — blogger.com has a popular one, but the trend lately has been with movabletype.com, which creates a blog that accepts reader comments among other perks. Minimal HTML knowledge is needed, and each new entry requires merely filling in a field and hitting "publish." If you don’t have a website, you can get free server space at blogspot.com.)

(And "Silliman" is short for "Ron Silliman.")

Silliman’s Blog – yes, that’s what it’s called – is sure to be a big hit; it’s already chock-full of his characteristically elephantine-memoried accounts of the strands, major but mostly minor, of literary influence in American poetry — Actualism, anyone? – not to mention his frank evaluation of the 50 or so books he’s reading by the likes of Tan Lin, Besmilr Brigham, and Anselm Hollo.

Other blogs out there include Katherine "The Blog Queen" Parrish’s squish, Rochesteronian Brendan Barr’s texturl, Torontonian tyro Angela Rawling’s nether, and my narcissistically titled Free Space Comix: The Blog. Lying Motherfucker boasts entries by writers as diverse as Martin Amis, Dr. Seuss and Ernest Hemingway: "Thursday, 21 february 2002: Went to bullfights. Matador a pansy; jumped in with a beachtowel and cocktail umbrella to show Ramon how it was done. Bull makes nice pet: more effective than dog at dissuading missionaries." Raw fun!

Let’s open the mailbag… An announcement from John Tranter that the complete collected poems of Henry J.-M. Levet (1874–1906), translated by Kirby Olson, are now available in translation for the first time ever on Jacket no. 18, news indeed – clicking through, I really liked this stuff, all the seemingly heady allusions of Nerval in sonnets and quatrains and, like his predecessor, an entire ouevre limited to 11 pages of mature poems.

I’m very happy to inform you that it’s not a joke – Ben Friedlander, Jacques Debrot and Kent Johnson did not cook him up over a bottle of Veuve Clichot – and kudos should be aimed at Dehli, New York’s own Kirby Olson for translating him. Rhyming "fiancé" with "ennui" might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but Valery Larbaud idolized Levet, and Blaise Cendrars and Phillipe Soupault are said to have taken a major cue from him. I’m sure the detourned posters of Levet in jeans are only a few weeks away, not to mention the movie starring Leonardo.

David Chan’s Alteranumerics – a set of fonts that toss up constellations of Fouriest principles in diagram form with each letter, so that a sentence becomes an outline for a heady, hot utopian daydream — made a recent appearance in Shark, and can be downloaded for free. And stephaniestrickland.com now contains the latest hypertext poem by the author whose name is cleverly embedded in the URL – she’s one of the few with a significant print and hypertext reputation and one to watch!

But the one you will thank me forever for is the Blonk Organ a Flash application that puts you in the driver’s seat of Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk’s incredible vocal chords, the bizarre things that he does with them, and the many many faces of thwarted semantic desire.

Posted by Brian Stefans at November 26, 2002 10:41 AM