The Making of E-Poetries: Buffalo, the Electronic Poetry Center, & Digital Poetics”
This presentation will begin with a description of the University at Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), a major international resource for innovative and digital poetries. It will consider the literary culture from which the EPC draws its energies, especially the approach to poetry taken by the EPC's core faculty of poets (Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Susan Howe, and Dennis Tedlock), poets who can be said to share varying approaches to the materiality of text. The EPC community, highlighted by E-Poetry 2001 will also be discussed. Drawing from this context, the presentation will look at the EPC as a literary object, discussing its philosophy of operating system, coding, access, and presentation of poetry. Attention will then be turned to the poetics of Glazier, the EPC's Director, tracing a history of his own poetics of the digital text and the evolution of concepts of digital poesis as exemplified in his forthcoming, Digital Poetics (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2001). Various approaches will be demonstrated as philosophies that might illuminate a digital poetic. This will include examples from and discussion of "Jumping to Occlusions" (hypertext), "Viz Études" (kinetic text), "Bromeliads" (JavaScript), "Cog" (Flash), and "The Clinamen" (ActionScript/XML). Finally, the text of Glazier's forthcoming manifesto, "Algorithmos", will be introduced to open a discussion of the role of materiality, code, and the programmable as means to the making of digital poetry.