21st Century Poetry: Poetry and the Internet by Beau Blue #4

The poetry from the discussion boards and in the Ezines of those boards in the mid nineties was all text based. Everyone was emulating print publishers and reveling in the fact that a lit pub was now easier and far cheaper to produce. POD changed things even further. Some very good independent outfits produced some really good non-print print publications. But the vast majority of those first poetry zines, like the vast majority of all things, was homogeneous and bland.

I started pushing the idea of internet poetry right then.

The poetry Ezines of the nineties missed the point of the internet's power. Some pubs and editors started presenting sound with their printed poems, realizing their audiences longed for a return to poetry's roots .. the spoken word performance. So, Poetry LA opened shop and started presenting recordings of poets reading their stuff and performing poetry on the internet.

More and more people are capitalizing on the inexpensive presentation of color graphics and photos. The Ezines keep getting slicker, but most are still caught in the last century. Pushing paper and ink, resisting e-books and e-periodicals, etc., etc. Depending too much on template driven publication software. Needless to say, I disagree with their approach.

But I feel a flash-over is coming. 

So much for a synopsis of how poetry and the internet are intertwined. Now for a call for group participation: I would like it if some of you dear readers would call out your favorite website and their URLs in the comments section of this post. 

It would be appreciated and just might steer this column to exotic poetic places. Thanks, Blue  

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.

21st Century Poetry: Poetry and the Internet by Beau Blue #2

Before the world wide web, was the networking computers of FidoNet and the Crossroads Board of one of those early Fido branches. Eight or thirteen or who remembers .. but it was early. And the board had a poetry group. It was 1985.

    I worked for aerospace and it was hooked into DARPA, or ARPA, or MILSTAR, and a bunch of think-tank universities. Floating around on the net they used was the topic fa.poetry. Teeny, tiny topic hardly ever used and a complete mystery to most of the nerdy engineering types that populated the cyber wires back then.

    In 1987 because of the growth of what we called UseNet and how many people each day complained of the arcane structure of it, the great USENET reorganization happened. "rec.arts.poems" was born out of that reorganization flame war and subsequent re-ordering.

    A few mathematicians, engineers, physicists, teachers and software tricksters showed up in RAP and started to play.

    In the early nineties the 16 million user USENET turned into the more than half a billion member World Wide Web. Lately, I'm told the internet is half the planet. More than three billion.

    Internet poetry is humongous and diverse and dribbling out at every seam the thing has got. But "rec.arts.poems" is one of its roots. In the earth of the web.

Poetry Commentary by Beau Blue

Talk about poetry? Hmmmm. Today's poetry. On the streets,in bars and coffee houses? Slams? Private lists and forums, maybe some blogs as well? And I'll rail against the ink and paper monsters that won't wake up.

But first is an observation and a disappointment. I'm not crazy about this real short line craze. A line should be a breath of expression. Each line must invite the audience to the  next line or it fails to carry the weight of the poem. At least a foot is required. But a foot and a half is still pretty fast.

The more spoken, the more obvious the line. The line is treacherous if you ignore it. Each line must lead to the next and the next or the tongue tip trips. The journey stops.

Makes me wonder how the single word line smiths keep their audience past the exhaustion of racing toward the end of every phrase.

I can understand being bored with pentameter, nothing moves so 16th century as pentameter, but even jazz has riffs, poetry as pizzicato chops of stones? Will more messages get through? Only if the channel is set to cummings and only cummings does cummings well.

Meet Beau Blue, Poetry Columnist for GAS

 Beau Blue is an old man recluse living in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. A systems engineer, he specialized in interfacing computers to machine tools and in networking computer systems. He came to the internet, known at the time as ARPAnet, when he worked with Ford Aerospace and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in the eighties. 

In 1993 he helped start Cruzio Communications, one of the first commercial internet service providers in the USA. He became one of the first internet literary publishers that same year with the introduction of "The Hawk", an arts and literary ezine aimed at engineers and designers. 

He has been publishing Internet poetry since 1995 when he and Michael McNeilley co-edited 'ZeroCity', one of the first poetry Ezines in the country.

Along the way, during his systems design career, he became involved with San Francisco Bay Area musicians and started a band called the Captec Project, "Community of Artists Patronized by Technology". The band appeared in various clubs in the bay area, performing his poetry to fusion and hard rock blues music. The Captec group was well received and an album, "Human Tricks", was produced in 1980 to positive reviews. Blue moved on from the Captec Project's fusion sound to the Alibi Blues and the Back Alley Blues Bands during the mid-eighties.

Blue retired from systems design in 2002 and he began publishing poetry animations with the advent of his third excursion into Internet poetry publication with "Beau Blue Presents". In 2004 "Blue's Cruzio Cafe" came into being and the two publications became part of animatedpoets.com the following year. 

Nowadays, Blue hides in the forest and works at keeping animatedpoets.com a unique and viable addition to the internet poetry landscape.