EPC celebrates poetry on the Web
Electronic Poetry Center offerings prove that April is not the cruelest month

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

April is National Poetry Month and what better place to behold a gallery of daring new work than the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), the definitive, Web-based, worldwide 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 millennium, 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 Pequeno Glazier, 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 groundbreaking 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!

- 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.

EPC offers access to wide range of related resources The aim of the Web-based Electronic Poetry Center at http://epc.buffalo.edu/ is to make a wide range of resources related to contemporary experimental and innovative poetries available to the public, says the center's director, Librarian Loss Pequeno Glazier, himself a poet working in digital media. EPC naturally contains a lot of writing, much of it in the center's searchable author libraries. Beyond that, however, the center links to a wide range of poetry and poetics resources. These include poetry events, the electronic poetry journal RIF/T; the rich audio art of LINEbreak, which features readings and interviews with notable avant-garde literary artists; the online performance space "EPCLive," the full-text, electronic editions of "Biblioteca," and an archive, calendar and files associated with the center's poetics discussion list and the widely renowned UB graduate program in poetics. Readers also can browse through EPC's many featured libraries. They will find many digital resources in its author, small press, sound and gallery areas, as well as references and links to related materials. Other EPC resources include the EPC Obits and collaboratively assembled poems, built by visitors to the EPC. Lists of poetry magazines and book publishers are available, as are lists to related Internet poetry and poetics resources. If you are looking for a resource by name, the "All Links" list offers access through a single alphabetical list to all EPC links to presses, magazines and organizations. Also available is an informal online directory of poets with whom readers can correspond