The UB Poetics List Papers
What did poets do before social media? They did this — better, longer, and with footnotes: the UB Poetics List, 1993–2014, in twenty-one volumes.
Series One
What did poets do before social media? They did this — better, longer, and with footnotes: the UB Poetics List, 1993–2014, in twenty-one volumes.
Text from the original Brain Scam post.
The Currents of the Poetics List — An Introduction to the Reading Editions
The front door to the whole project: a 12-page introduction to all 242 monthly reading editions of the UB Poetics List, from the first message in December 1993 to the closing in January 2014. Two movements — the list’s arguments about poetry (Pound, the lyric, translation, appropriation) and its arguments about itself (who is in the room, what a poem is worth, the 1998–99 shift to moderation, the exodus to the blogs) — plus a portrait gallery of the major voices and an afterword on the LISTSERV form itself, from Éric Thomas’s 1986 software to the feed that replaced it. By December 2013 a month held fourteen messages; in January 2014 the diaspora returned with 269 to say goodbye. Every month named is a live link into the editions.
@poetics — Archive of Electronic Correspondence, Volume I: 1993–1999
The complete record begins: 73 monthly editions, 39,806 messages, from the two letters of December 1993 (Quartermain reporting Robin Blaser’s Holy Forest launch; Sherwood’s “Violent Dictionary”) to the end of 1999. Every month set down in full and in order, each opening with an index of writers, names mentioned, and concepts — every entry linked to its message. 33,622 pages, and a big download (about 100 MB).
@poetics — Archive of Electronic Correspondence, Volume II: 2000–2006
The middle volume and the loudest: 84 monthly editions, roughly 54,500 messages — the largest of the three. The years everything happens at once: 9/11, the invasion month of March 2003 (the list’s biggest ever), Flarf’s arrival, Creeley’s death and its 121 messages, and the exodus to the blogs that would hollow the room out. Same apparatus: complete, indexed, linked. 73,650 pages, and the biggest download of the series (about 200 MB).
@poetics — Archive of Electronic Correspondence, Volume III: 2007–2014
The long ending: 85 monthly editions, 26,216 messages, January 2007 to the closing of the list in January 2014. The argument thins into announcement — readings, books, deaths, sent into a room that answered less and less. December 2013 holds fourteen messages; January 2014 surges to 269 as everyone returns to say goodbye. 37,936 pages, fully indexed — a big download (about 100 MB).
The Editor’s Introductions, Collected: 1993–2014
All 242 monthly introductions in one volume — a twenty-year narrative history of the list in miniature, from the two-letter December of 1993 to the farewell of January 2014, each grounded in that month’s actual arguments and quoting them verbatim. 468 pages: the introductions alone now run to the length of a substantial book.
poetics@ — Poetry, Argument, and the Early Years of the UB Poetics List (A Reading Edition of the Roof Books Volume, 1999)
The first book ever made from the list: poetics@, edited by Joel Kuszai, published by Roof Books with the Segue Foundation in 1999 and commissioned by Charles Bernstein and James Sherry. The jacket says “133 e-mails from 67 writers”; this edition reproduces all 143 discrete items across those 67 writers (the difference is the op-eds, manifestos, and cross-posts Kuszai set alongside the mail), keeping his five sections, the Bernstein preface, and the Kuszai introduction verbatim. Added: headnotes above every post, brief lives of the contributors, and Brian Kim Stefans’s contemporary review. Creeley, Perloff, Silliman, Scalapino, and the “social poem” debate entire. 247 pages.
Jack and I Were Both Fluent in Martian: The UB Poetics List Writings of Kevin Killian, 1995–2014
Kevin Killian posted from spring 1995 to 2014, from an account shared with his wife Dodie Bellamy (”Hi, this is really from Kevin and not from Dodie”); this book picks out his side of the household, post by post. Here is the four-day dispatch from the 1995 Blaser conference in Vancouver (”Steve McCaffery is a God”); the Spicer lore from the man who wrote the biography with Lewis Ellingham and edited the Collected; the crowd-sourced bets and O’Hara biopic casting calls; and the yes-only reviews he was writing here years before his celebrated thousands on Amazon. Reviews and essays whole, notices gathered apart, everything else catalogued at the back. 277 pages.
“There Are the Alps, Fools!” — Pounding Fascism on the UB Poetics List, 1995–2008
The list’s most durable quarrel: what to do with Ezra Pound, technical father of the image, the fragment, and collage — and propagandist for Mussolini. Some forty-five voices, 1995–2008, in four movements: the moral trial, the technical debt, whether the methods can be inherited clean of the politics, and the questions Pound left behind. The title is Basil Bunting’s, from “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos”; the hinge is Bernstein’s essay “Pounding Fascism” (A Poetics, Harvard, 1992), which argues that Pound’s collage — fragments that “will not submit to a unitary measure” — is structurally at war with the order he preached. The list made and unmade that case for thirteen years. 93 pages.
Re: It’s 8:23 in New York — Poetry and the Wars After 9/11 on the UB Poetics List, 2001–2011
On the night of 11 September 2001, Charles Bernstein crossed the 59th Street bridge, sat in a coffee shop, and sent the list a dispatch closing with the clock: It’s 8:23 in New York. The room replied for ten years; this book is that reply — upward of eighty voices, 2001–2011, in four movements: September and the first poems; the run-up to Iraq, the Silliman–Watten quarrel, and the Amiri Baraka Somebody Blew Up America affair; Sam Hamill’s refusal of Laura Bush’s White House symposium and Poets Against the War; then Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the long settling into elegy. Every passage verbatim and attributed, with dispatches from Auckland, Australia, Montreal, and Baghdad. 322 pages.
The Man Who Sold the Listserv: Every Sighting of David Bowie on the UB Poetics List, 1996–2013
A 28-page companion: all nineteen appearances of David Bowie in the archive, 1996–2013 — a producer’s credit, a legal example, a fashion note, a found metaphor, a band’s press release, an obituary of another man, two event listings, one civic pageant. He is reached for constantly and never once examined, and the notes press a thesis: that Bowie’s methods — the Burroughs cut-up, the serial personae, composition by procedure — put him nearer the list’s own poetics than it ever paused to notice. The exception is the glory of the archive: late summer 2002, when the San Francisco poets around Kevin Killian and the artist Rex Ray mounted a gallery show, a track-by-track re-recording of Low, and a staged pageant of Bowie’s entire life, cast with poets.
How I Made This Book
A seven-page making-of for The Man Who Sold the Listserv: how the Bowie volume was built in sixteen exchanges with Claude — 42 candidate posts winnowed to 19 genuine sightings, the invention of Kristen M. Fabians piece by piece, and every instruction reproduced in order, from “Just for fun” to the last deranged sentence. Design borrowed from Pale Fire.
Poetry Is for Everyone: The Poetics-List Writings of Chris Stroffolino, 1994–2013
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1963; doctorate on Shakespeare’s middle comedies from SUNY Albany (”(sm)allbany”), 1998; sixteen years on the list, December 1994 to 2013. Stroffolino started almost nothing and answered nearly everyone, and this edition restores the company: some 470 posts selected from more than a thousand, each set beneath the very line it was answering. De Man beside Sly Stone; the avant-garde-and-academy quarrel argued through his own mother; the adjunct wages and rotary phone; the 1998 Silver Jews record (he played on it) giving way to his own band, Continuous Peasant; the 2004 bicycle accident carried sidelong, in puns, never announced. Two appendices — notices and a complete catalogue — “so that nothing is pretended away.” 595 pages, the biggest single-author volume.
Saint Elizabeth Street: The UB Poetics List Writings of Jennifer Bartlett, 2005–2014
Jennifer Bartlett arrived in winter 2005 selling a magazine: Saint Elizabeth Street, run out of Brooklyn on nine dollars a year, its name echoing the hospital where Pound spent his twelve committed years. Thirty-five posts, 2005–2014, from the list’s clearest voice for a poetics of disability: co-editor, with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, of Beauty Is a Verb (2011); biographer-in-progress of Larry Eigner; daughter of the critic Lee Bartlett; the one who noticed, during the 2011 Rita Dove–Helen Vendler anthology wars, that the disabled poets were simply not in the book at all. Her spelling is kept exactly as typed. She was among the last still talking when the list closed, defending — of all things — the moderation.
The Only New Device: Appropriation, Procedure, and the New on the UB Poetics List, 1994–2013
The title is Ron Silliman’s, from October 1994: reviewing the “New Coast” anthology, he remarked that apart from one lift from Jenny Holzer it contained no device you could not already find in the elders. This book runs that argument from 1994 to the 2009 bonfire over Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day — upward of ninety voices in four parts: the mid-90s generational skirmishes; the machines-and-screen strand from hypertext through the Buffalo E-Poetry festivals to codework; Flarf, from spam-poems to the BBC; and conceptual writing, built around Kent Johnson’s page-for-page parody of Day. Framed by Gilbert Simondon’s account of the technical object: devices not invented but concretized. 314 pages.
WARNING ~ POETRY AREA: Publics Under Construction — The UB Poetics List Writings of Charles Bernstein, 1994–2014
The founder’s own file: 212 posts, 1994–2014, from the man who started the list in late 1993 and closed it in January 2014 with “The Poetics List is no longer active.” Here are the “Provisional Institutions” essay of August 1994; the writing Experiments (”Write the worst possible poem you can imagine”); the mock-bylaw forbidding posts “between :43 and :52 minutes after the hour”; the quarrels with official verse culture; and the death notices, beginning with Brainard in 1994, that accumulate into a communal book of the dead. Also kept where it fell: the February 1998 Plath–Hughes post signed “emma bernstein, age 12 1/2.” His last word, closing twenty years: “Onward!” 337 pages.
I Don’t Have Time to Write Today: The Poetics-List Writings of Brian Kim Stefans, 1999–2010
Several hundred messages, April 1999 to a final flare in 2010; the 148 with substance are kept, by year, with the pure forwards let go. The title is his own — the opening of a post he wrote anyway, at two thousand words. Three men share the file: the impresario (Segue series, arras.net, UbuWeb, and in 2002–03 the anti-war site Circulars, signed “CIRCULATE WILDLY”); the polemicist (the Pound-and-fascism posts of summer 1999, the open letter to Kent Johnson, the “Defense of Jacques”); and the critic of the Little Reviews — one book, one paragraph, from January 2000, the originals of pieces later cut down for Publishers Weekly. A fourth man lives in the From: line: Random House, Fodor’s, CUNY, then arras.net — a decade of rent and ambition told in mail headers. 323 pages.
A Poetics of the Rebuilt Archive
Brian Kim Stefans’s seven-page statement of method: the reading edition as scholarship, with vocabulary borrowed from litigation, journalism, and digital editing — and the project’s decisive discovery, that the publicly hosted archive is corrupted, its “October 1995” file actually holding May 1998, silently falsifying the record. With a candid section on the ethics of the Fabians persona.
Series Two
Part two of the recovery: more volumes from the early-internet mailing list where poets argued, mourned, and thought out loud daily for twenty years.
Text from the original Brain Scam post.
Poetics, Time, Body Disruption and Marginally Queer Solutions: kari edwards on the UB Poetics List, 1996–2006
kari edwards subscribed in July 2001 and posted 599 times; her last message came on 20 November 2006, the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and she died twelve days later, on her fifty-second birthday. She was the list’s most prolific poster in 2003 — 276 posts, mostly poems, ending that November with the 4,353-word list of the reported trans dead, 1970–2003, to which one person replied. The book’s center is the November 2003 “hermaphrodite” thread — thirty-plus posts across four subject lines, the largest discussion of trans poetics in the archive, and the only one where the person under discussion is in the room answering. 154 excerpts, 43 hands, 1996–2006, with an introduction placing her in trans poetry’s deep history, from Jennie June’s “Fairie Songs” to Trace Peterson’s TSQ account. 166 pages.
The Insincerity of Poetic Candor: Kent Johnson, Araki Yasusada, and the Authorship Question on the UB Poetics List, 1995–2012
One man, one book, seventeen years of argument, never settled. Doubled Flowering presented poems as the work of a Hiroshima survivor and was a fabrication; Kent Johnson has been named in connection with it since 1995 and never confirmed or denied. The numbers: Johnson wrote 334 posts, only 30 touching Yasusada; of 385 Yasusada posts on the list, other people discussed him in 868 more. His last posts in his own name are February 2000; the argument’s busiest month — 58 posts naming him — is October 2009. 126 excerpts, 64 hands, 1995–2012, every charge printed beside Johnson’s answer where he made one, plus the summer 1997 Boston Review forum (Chang, Lew, Lin, Tabios, Yau) the list quoted for a decade without printing. 178 pages.
Neglectorino! The Half-Life of a Reputation — Neglect, the Canon and the Out-of-Print on the UB Poetics List (and Elsewhere)
Larry Fagin coined the word; Aldon Nielsen gave it its best formulation on 1 February 2006 — a “poetic submolecular particle adhering to all great poets who are overlooked… perhaps named the neglectorino.” This volume tracks the sixteen-year argument about neglect and the out-of-print: 91 excerpts in 67 hands, filtered from 2,932 posts in the 120,564-message archive, plus Fagin’s list of 72 neglected writers (Silliman’s blog, 3 January 2006), CA Conrad’s Neglectorino Project entire (58 contributors, 26–31 January 2006), and a reading list of 459 books and magazines, every one checked for availability in July 2026. The findings: of the 219 books named on Conrad’s blog, 124 remain out of print and 50 have been rescued; the argument itself rescued seventeen. 135 pages.
The Internet Text — Volume I: Denatured Wryting · Theory and Arguments, 1994–2014 (The Complete UB Poetics Listserv Work of Alan Sondheim)
Alan Sondheim joined the list on 29 April 1994 and left on 31 January 2014, the day it closed. In between: 4,293 posts, 1,657,193 words, twenty-two versions of his own name. The archive holds 120,549 posts; one in twenty-eight is his. Volume I of the five-volume complete edition holds the prose — 2,442 posts, everything in which he is talking to somebody — plus the room answering back in 476 other hands. The spine is the 2002–05 argument over whether he should be allowed to continue, which was really the first public argument about a question nobody had named: what a person is allowed to send you. With the full record of his pre-list career: the 1971 hypercube experiments at Brown, the 1967 ESP-Disk record, The Blue Tape with Kathy Acker. 1,933 pages.
The Internet Text — Volume II: Sending Out Again, 1994–2001 (The Complete UB Poetics Listserv Work of Alan Sondheim)
The years the practice forms: 725 poems, 271,390 words, seventeen signatures. The title is from his first post, 29 April 1994 — and the first Sondheim on the list is actually somebody else posting him: Bernstein forwarded “THE START OF IT ALL” two days before Sondheim subscribed. Here are the birth of the avatars — Julu in 1996, Jennifer and Nikuko in 1997 — the MOO and CU-SeeMe years, and the five months of 1997 when the middle name in his byline stopped being a name: Alan+++Sondheim, Alan /dev/null Sondheim, Alan chown Sondheim, Alan rm -r Sondheim. Eighteen of the nineteen bylines in the whole edition occur in this volume. Every post complete, unaltered, in fixed width, in order. 815 pages.
The Internet Text — Volume III: Psalm of Future Disappearance, 2002–2003 (The Complete UB Poetics Listserv Work of Alan Sondheim)
The flood: 943 poems and 358,911 words in twenty-four months — the densest stretch of the whole thirty-year practice, and the two years the list argued hardest about the volume of it. His entire reply to that argument: “Either try the delete key or set up a filter” (26 August 2002). The epigraph is his own verdict of 7 May 2002 — “my work is idiotic; it covers the same ground over and over” — and the volume is the counter-evidence: the prime-number poem of New Year’s morning 2002, the “homeland vortex” grids, the collages built from live server logs and crash traces. 2002 alone: 387 poems, 151,165 words. 1,135 pages.
The Internet Text — Volume IV: On Code and Codework, 2004–2005 (The Complete UB Poetics Listserv Work of Alan Sondheim)
The peak and the naming: 794 poems, 290,395 words, one signature. 2004 is his largest year on the list — 606 poems — and 2005, at 215, is where it stops. These are the years the practice carries the name he gave it: codework, coined in the American Book Review (September–October 2001), with Rita Raley in Electronic Book Review crediting “Alan Sondheim, who has given the practice and genre its name.” His own gloss, from nettime in February 2004: “I am writing from the position of dirty code, world-code, which may or may not operate, and that may or may not be the point.” 915 pages.
The Internet Text — Volume V: Connection Went Away, 2006–2014 (The Complete UB Poetics Listserv Work of Alan Sondheim)
The shortest volume, with a shape: 38 poems in 2006 where 2004 had 606; a return to 201 in 2007, into video, avatar, and motion capture; then an eight-year fade. 391 poems, 139,699 words in all. Julu, Jennifer, and Nikuko are never mentioned after 2009. The last poem is “lists, forums, etc. :” of 28 January 2014; the letter he sent three days later as the list closed — “Poetics +++, last post from the wilderness, and thanks” — is in Volume I, with the letters. The epigraph, from 1997, is the practice’s standing offer: “Enjoy, delete, pass on, the text is yours for the asking.” 418 pages.
How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count the Bytes: An Interview with the Sorting Program — Brian Kim Stefans talks to sortpost.py about The Complete UB Poetics Listserv Work of Alan Sondheim
A ten-page interview, over stdin and stdout, between Brian Kim Stefans and sortpost.py — the ninth version of the Python program that sorted Sondheim’s 4,293 posts into poems and letters. The program’s confessions are the making-of of the whole edition: its first classifier reclassified 1,129 poems as email, because Sondheim hard-wrapped everything at seventy-two characters (”I was measuring the width of a VT100 in 1994”); the reliable signals turned out to be a bare underscore ending 1,361 poems and his name ending 160 letters; the subject-line rule — is somebody else posting under this subject the same month? — moved 215 pieces, the largest correction in the project. The transcript is also a working Python file: running it prints the interview.
Encomia — Praise for the Dead on the UB Poetics List, 1994–2014
The largest volume in the series: 1,158 pages, 383 entries, 2,156 messages, 472 hands — 408 deaths and what the room said about them. The first notice is Bernstein’s for Joe Brainard, 27 May 1994; the last, 9 January 2014, reports Roy Campbell and Amiri Baraka in one unanswered message. Ginsberg drew 116 messages, Creeley 121, Derrida 85, Ingmar Bergman 58 — more than any poet who died that year. Bernstein opens 32 entries; 129 entries are a single message nobody answered; Seamus Heaney is never mentioned at all. Each entry prints the announcing post and everything that followed, whole and in order, with life dates verified outside the archive.