Loss Pequeno Glazier is director of the Electronic Poetry Center. He is also a poet, librarian, professor and Webmaster for the College of Arts and Sciences.

The Electronic Poetry Center http://epc.buffalo.edu has attracted national attention, but is unfamiliar to many at UB. Just what is the EPC?

The EPC, sponsored by the Dean's Office in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Poetics Program in the Department of English, might be UB's most successful and widely recognized humanities computing initiative. It serves as a central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics produced at the UB, as well as elsewhere on the Web, providing poetry texts, multi-media resources and supporting course syllabi. Externally, the EPC helps to represent UB's strength in poetry, with about 6 million uses a year in more than 80 countries. It has received attention from publications as diverse as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Publishers Weekly, Postmodern Culture, and The New Yorker. Internationally, it has received attention from the Heraldo de Mexico and has received media coverage in Canada, the UK, France, Norway, Spain, Australia and New Zealand, among other places.

What is your role in its development and upkeep?

I am the director of the EPC. I plan for new developments, do analysis and maintenance for the system, and implement technical standards. In coordination with EPC Executive Editor Charles Bernstein, I handle editorial and policy issues related to the center. The EPC also sponsors student interns, directed studies and special projects within the center, activities that I direct. Such programs allow students from a wide range of disciplines to participate in the development of a complex, large-scale online digital project, experience that has prime value for the marketability of students in the professional world. We also host international scholars, such as the recent scholar from France who came to study the EPC.

Is the EPC particularly appropriate for the presentation of new poetic forms, as opposed to traditional or historical modes of literary expression?

The selection of the material included in the EPC is meant in no way to express any bias for or against traditional or historical modes of literary expression. Simply put, we decided at the outset that this UB site would be of greatest value if it were focused on a "specific" area of poetry. Given the curriculum of the Poetics Program, the focus of the Poetics Program core faculty (Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe and Dennis Tedlock) on innovative poets, and the emphasis of UB's collection of 20th century poetry, it made sense for the EPC to focus on contemporary, innovative poetries. In this regard, the EPC helps complete the picture, making UB almost indisputably the pre-eminent location for the study of innovative poetry in the country.

What is your particular interest in this kind of writing?

My interest in innovative poetry comes from my long interest in the activities of literary small presses, in numerous innovative poets and in the activities of the Poetics Program at UB. After a number of years working in the electronic medium, I have become particularly fascinated with the possibilities of the electronic medium for innovative poetic practice. (Indeed, I feel that innovative poets may be the most qualified to interpret and explore the digital medium.) That is to say, considering the many interesting practices of experimental poetry, what can be done in the electronic medium that could not done before? This raises a number of fascinating possibilities for poetry, including visual poetry, kinetic poetry and programmed poetry, issues that I take up in my "Digital Poetics" book (forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press next year). The EPC "Gallery" highlights some of these works, as will the "E-Poetry" section of the EPC, to be inaugurated at the end of this year.

What is the relationship of the EPC to the Poetics Program? To the Wednesdays at 4 PLUS literary series? To "LINEbreak," the radio program on new poetry?

The EPC is the poetry site of the Poetics Program. It supplements the syllabi of numerous courses, both within and outside of English, and serves as a major recruitment tool for new students for the program and the department. The Wednesdays at 4 PLUS literary series also is part of the Poetics Program; sometimes EPC resources are developed in conjunction with a visiting poet or with a special event, such as Robert Creeley's 70th Birthday Celebration http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/creeley/70th/. The award-winning LINEbreak series, produced by Martin Spinelli and Charles Bernstein, was funded by the Poetics Program and developed for distribution through the EPC.

The site is very well-organized, deep, clear, with many good links-someone called it "compelling evidence that librarians should run the world." Are there other such sites for new poetry out there? What do you think makes this one so popular?

The Latin American writer and librarian, Jorge Luis Borges, once wrote of his sense that "the book and the labyrinth were one and the same," a thought that is even more vivid in the electronic age! I think that order, the careful selection and arrangement of texts, and system design has helped make the EPC so successful, along with meticulous standards in its technical aspects. In an age of information overload, focus can be the key. In addition, we make sure that all EPC texts are accurate and approved by their authors. Finally, we were fortunate to participate in the Online Computer Library Center's U.S. Department of Education-funded project CIRG (Cataloging Internet Resources Group) which, through the initiative of the University Libraries Central Technical Services Group, catalogued and made available selected texts nationally and internationally through major bibliographic databases.

What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?

I would add a question about future plans for the EPC and a question about the relevance of digital poetry to education in general. Regarding our plans, the EPC is developing a Latin-American component of its resources, as well as an "E-poetries" component, a page that will highlight the most visionary of digital projects currently available. We are in the process of adding more sound resources, especially for contemporary women poets, and have recently added video to the EPC-one recent video included a performance by Charles Bernstein and we are hoping to add a video of Robert Creeley reading this semester. As to the second question, I think that innovative poetries are not only appropriate for the Web but, as I will explore in my Spring 2000 English graduate seminar on "Digital Poetics," innovative poetry gives us a way to see it all better when it comes to the uncanny textual and social dimensions of the electronic age. These dimensions are relevant to almost any discipline because in a world where so much is uncertain, one thing can be counted on: the relation between digital practice and education will become more intricately interwoven with each day before us