21st Century Poetry: Poetry and the Internet by Beau Blue #3

 

It was 1994 and the Netscape browser was born. Guys in commercial internet service providing were no longer faced with having to put up two servers, one for 'text-based' web and one for WAIS. Gopher was about to die, why bother with WAIS? [It was the text based computer server that fed documents to a user on searches. The app interface was called 'gopher' and the server was called WAIS. There was a competition between web servers and gopher servers when this was all text based. Netscape was the Graphical User Interface that allowed the World Wide Web blossom.] And presto the web became gigantic.The graphical user interface for the web was a gigantic starting gun.

Server providers started to provide seminars, live in real space, to tell everybody what was happening and how this THING, this internet, was going to let users be as creative as they could be.

Providers in a hurry started providing their own content. Some members of RAP  (Rec.Arts.Poems) started inviting other members of RAP to help. ZeroCity was born. All before '95.

More than 75 poets from all over the map, mostly found by McNeilley, showed up in ZeroCity.

Internet poetry moved into presentation websites and discussion forums, blogs, and even traditional print pubs making their first steps onto the web. The landscape was diverse and treacherous. And the poetry also moved onto MySpace and Yahoo and eventually to YouTube and Facebook and other social platforms. As creative as they could be became the norm.

We shuttered ZeroCity 18 months before Michael McNeilley died. I started "Beau Blue Presents" with broadsides by Robert Sward, Bill Minor, Ellen Bass, Beau Blue and Michael McNeilley. In 2000, I started making cartoons. By then I was head of web development for the Stanford Business School.

My colleagues and I started producing discussion forum software and other net based tools to facilitate education and make even Stanford professors more productive. Soon, poetry discussion forums were everywhere. So many template based bulletin board systems gave rise to as many template driven discussion forum software packages and hundreds of poetry forums sprung up over the nights of the next few years. Everybody became a 'contestant' and internet poetry turned slightly beige.