A Lean, Mean Electronic Poetry Machine Proves April Is Not the Cruelest Month

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- April is National Poetry Month and what better place to behold a gallery of daring new work than the University at Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), the Web-based definitive world-wide resource for digital poetry and an example of ways in which information technology assists the exploration of the humanities.

In honor of the first poetry month of the new millenium, the center is presenting "Poetry for April," a special collection of new digital works for and about April, at http://epc.buffalo.edu/ .

What is digital poetry, anyway? Poet Loss Pequeño Glazier, UB librarian and director of EPC, describes it as "poetry that cannot occur on paper."

That means, he says, that the work has movement or programming qualities that allow for forms of experimentation that wouldn't even occur to the writer of print poetry. It is poetry that moves, sings, talks, hops around, changes, interacts with the reader, is performed (or performs itself), allows readers to manipulate or even change it, or pushes the literary envelope in other provocative and novel ways.

. Since it was founded, the EPC has been a ground-breaking innovation in the world of the Web since it provides an edited collection of primary literary texts. It is one of the first sites ever to provide a collaboration between a university and the innovative writing community and has set a standard for electronic librarianship and a national model for mining the possibilities of a true online archive on the Internet.

"EPC presents tomorrow's poetry today," says Glazier. "It introduces pioneering literary artists and makes it possible for the reader to find out about many new kinds of poesis or 'ways of making' a poem, methods unheard of until recently."

EPC is the largest poetry Web site in the world and has been on the scene since 1994 -- when the Web was small, non-commercial and principally of interest to those in technical fields. Last year, the center entertained more than 175,000 reader transactions, bringing

its total number of reader interactions to 879,859 from more than 90 countries since it went online.

What these visitors have found there is fun, weird, odd-duck, perplexing and beautiful. This is poetry that soothes with sound, color, shape and movement; provokes consideration of complex issues or walks right up and pokes you in the mind for apparently no reason at all. For a peek at what's available, check out some of EPC's current digital poetry exhibits:

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/deluxe/two/paddle.html

(Kinetic poetry: "Paddle" by Neil Hennessey

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/deluxe/two/puddle.html

(Kinetic poetry: "Puddle" by Neil Hennessey

http://www.eastgate.com/Dispossession/Welcome.html

(Hypertext poetry: "Dispossession" by Robert Kendall

http://www.ekac.org/transgenic.html

Transgenic art: Eduardo Kac is a brilliant poet in a variety of media. This is his prose "proposal" for the development of a transgenic canine whose DNA is laced with the GFP -- Green Fluorescence Protein. The result? A glowing green dog with a fluorescence emission spectrum that peaks at 510 nm.) (Download the glowing green mutt at http://www.ekac.org/interactive.html )

http://www.ekac.org/interactive.html

Telepresence art: "Darker than Night," an Edward Kac literary/visual art work first shown in a bat cave at the Blijdorp Zoological Gardens in Rotterdam. It explores the human-robot-animal interface as a means of mediating relations of empathy. The participants are a telerobotic bat ('batbot') and more than 300 Egyptian Fruit Bats who share a cave and become aware of their mutual presence through sonar emissions.

http://home.ptd.net/~clkpoet/maincont.html Click poetry and other work by David Knoebel integrating words, image and sound)

Another of Kac's works, "Uirapuru" celebrates and extends the myth of a magical Amazonian bird that will sing to you at http://www.ekac.org/uirapuru.html . This complex and fascinating project incorporates the writer's personal mythology into the realm of the rainforest and, in the process, transforms the bird into a telerobotic flying fish that can be manipulated by the reader. "Uirapuru" was named one of the top three artworks in Japan's InterCommunication Center's 1999 Biennale.

The Electronic Poetry Center is a central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics produced at UB and elsewhere on the Internet. It is produced and supported by the Poetics Program, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, and the University Libraries, all at the University at Buffalo.