In my final assignment for my graduate course in Literature in Cyberspace taught by Professor and Poet Bill Lavender at UNO, University of New Orleans, I would like to direct the criticism of the many Authors we studied on a particular aspect of the blogosphere, the one dedicated to Poetry.
(The Sun, watercolor on printable A4 paper, Anny Ballardini)
What
could be surprising and of interest to previous generations, is that
now Poetry, thanks to a quick interfaced system, is available without
any borders, be them social, racial, logistic, or linguistic (the latter
specifically with concrete poetry that is reaching a broader public).
Thanks to the internet in general, and in this context to blogging, poetry
with its poetic message has reached all those who are willing to read
in the Western world. (By Western world I mean states that do not undergo
the designation of third, fourth, fifth, … world countries. Thus
I consider "western" Japan, part of China and of India, Australia, New
Zealand and part of South Africa, North Africa, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon,
Iran, Iraq, Syria, as well as some privileged nuclei in South and Central
America, particularly the great apparition of Brazilian poetry.)
For poetry, and for
the written word in general, the internet - of which blogging is one
of the most astounding aspects – becomes the product of the second
greatest revolution after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg.
With Greg Ruggiero
of the Immediast Underground, we are experimenting a distinction
between public and audience. “An audience is passive; a public
is participatory”. The free circulation of blogs opposed to
the media seen as “a corporate possession” in which one “cannot
participate” has brought, and will bring in the near future,
an inevitable change to our societies, a transformation of which we are
the main actors and directors. It is up to us to outline a better understanding
of what will be our supporting values.
I acknowledge first
of all my Professor, Bill Lavender, for the quantity and quality of directions
given during the course. I would have never thought a semester could give
anyone so much in terms of research, in-depth study, critical outlook, and
an interest in the net seen as a scholarly archive. I would also like to
remember my virtual classmates who shared with me the reading of so much
material, and panicked with the approaching of the dates on which our assignments
were due. A particular mention goes to Nicole Lynn Pugh for her work and
direct insights, as well as to her mere presence “on the net”.
I tried in a very short time to get acquainted with Dreamweaver 8 in order to prepare my thesis, and a special thanks goes to Joel Weishaus who tried to give me an idea of what to use or not by e-mail (if you think that we have two different versions and besides that mine is in Italian and his in English, jokes cannot but abound in this context).
In Introduction:
Communication I connected my topic to the material we had to read
during the course. I tried, thanks to the directives received by our Professor
during the various assignments, to connect Poetry Blogs to the critical
studies by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan,
Ted Nelson, George P. Landow, Richard Rorty, James O’ Donnell,
to the two novels by William Gibson: Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition,
to the evolution of writing or the history of textuality with its apogee in 1450
with Johann Gutenberg’s movable type and the printing press, to hypertexts
linked to the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, to the idea of “cyberspace” with
its many e-zines, hypertexts in general (see Eastgate Systems Reading Room for
fiction), and finally ubuweb.com used as a reference mainly for the creative
and critical work by Kenneth Goldsmith, Brian Kim
Stefans, Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein, David Daniels, Darren Wershler-Henry,
Neil Hennessy, and Loss Pequeňo Glazier’s work.
Under Interview you will find the questions I sent to some Poet Bloggers I usually follow, if not daily, at least weekly. To them goes my warm acknowledgment, it is thanks to their answers that the present work has acquired both originality and a particular outlook. Authors who, regardless of the many commitments, have accepted my invitation. The quality of the answers is exceptional and I would like to praise them all for their sincere approach to the questions. There is not one similar response, faithful to the development of their work.
Blogs I visit is a selected separate list of the blogs that appear on the Blogroll of my blog. It is meant to highlight the blogs I see as the most important in the field of poetry at the moment.
What is a blog illustrates my attempt in drawing a History of blogs, or weblogs as they were initially called.
Webliography records some of the many links I have used during the semester.
And finally When Blogs Will Be. This is my very first page with Dreamweaver, I could not believe at my eyes when the picture I inserted was automatically repeated all over the page. It has for me the imprint of an aura, the little spark of enthusiasm that brought me to continue, to try to read and understand what this software had to offer, how to use it in order to get to what I had in mind, and later on, how to let the software work with me and find new ways of collaboration within the aim of a new way of creating.
Behind all this there is Bill Lavender’s charisma and refined education. I do not think other professors would have succeeded in getting their students to achieve this much in just a few months. I therefore dedicate this work to him.
