24 October 1999
History of Newspoetry
I coined the term Newspoetry in December 1995 when I made
it my New Years Resolution to write a poem a day about events in the
news in 1996. I was mostly successful, although real life pressures
caused me to take off the months of July, October, and December. For
those other nine months, though, I managed to write a poem a day. I
almost never shared these poems with friends, in fact I didn't tell
very many people what I was up to. Instead, I would print out three
copies of the poem on any given day and tape them anonymously to walls
at Illinois State University, tape them inside men's room stalls (despite
my concern with gender bias, I chose not to tape them up inside women's
restrooms), or slip them into copies of the News-Gazette
in newspaper machines. I thought that if someone who would ordinarily
steer clear of anything called political or poetry found a political
poem in their newspaper or in a public library or restroom, they might
be confused enough to read it and think about it. After all, they weren't
being put on the spot: in fact there was no way they could respond to
the poem except by taking it down and complaining about it to other
people.
I wanted a writing project that was focused on readers
rather than on the writer. Newspoetry was a solution to that problem
for a few reasons. The writing was anonymous (it is illegal, after all,
to put poems inside the News-Gazette, and it would have been imprudent
to sign them; furthermore, to put my name on it would shift focus back
from reader to writer, to the extent that any signed artwork is an advertisement
for the artist who created it). It was also furiously anachronistic
and unpublishable. In addition to breaking the rules of poetry and being,
in general, hastily-written, they were in no way timeless classics.
They were, in fact, instantly dated and their relevance was, for the
most part, limited to the week in which they were written. Finally,
most of the poems were not about me or my experiences. The ones written
in the first person were still about my observations of other people
and events. They were not lyrical. Another consideration was complaints
from friends on the left who are concerned with events in the news,
but can't stand the newspaper. Was there a way of saving the news from
the style in which it was written?
After 1996, while I had for the most part stopped writing
Newspoems, the momentum of the process continued and was given focus
by my old show on WEFT - Eclectic
Seizure. Eclectic Seizure was, at that time, in a state of political
instability, and so Danielle Chynoweth and I rose up and seized the
first fifteen minutes of Eclectic Seizure in a bloodless coup and we
created a news program called "All the News that Fits to Sing"
in which we would perform art based on the weeks political events, locally,
nationally, and internationally. We had wanted to, and still want to,
have our own newspoetry show on WEFT, but over the 90's WEFT has become
resistant to new programming ideas.
In 1998, Danielle went to New York and a new generation
of friends moved into Eclectic Seizure. I went back to writing Newspoetry
to be distributed anonymously, this time at the University of Illinois,
and I created a one-page newspaper called "The Daily Poem."
This time I shared the Daily Poem with friends and colleagues and received
a fair amount of encouragement. The Octopus, even though they have never
responded to any of the writing I've submitted to them over the years
using my real name, actually printed one
of these poems under the pseudonym "Q. Synopsis."
This was the year that Scott and Dirk and I began work
on the Unknown,
and also the year that Sigfried Gold began On The Job Consulting. I
began to learn how to build websites and realized their potential as
an artistic medium. Specifically, websites aren't yet regulated by effective
laws against plagiarism
and slander,
they can be easily updated daily, and, as a distribution medium, the
internet is unrivaled. The only thing that reaches a larger audience
than the Internet is the Moon.
So, for 1999, I decided I would retry my new years resolution
for 1996, and write a poem a day about events in the news, and post
them on the Internet. This way I felt I could succeed, because if I
missed a single day, I imagined, the whole world would know. I spent
Christmas break coding fiercely, building the architecture of the site
I would, over the coming year, populate with poems.
At the time, I solicited participation from friends but
had underestimated what kind of response I'd get. Already, by New Years
day, I received a poem over email from Dirk Stratton.
By the end of the first week of January I had received
two poems from Dirk, two from Joe Futrelle, and Scott Rettberg even
wrote a sonnet. Newspoetry was out of the starting gate and the momentum
continued to accumulate. The number of people participating or interested
in the project continues to grow, as does the quality of the writing
and the technical sophistication of the poems - forays into CGI
scripting, collage, music, animation,
concrete
poetry, and various forms of hypertext
have all been attempted. It's been a ton of work
and two tons of joy.
So, to conclude, here is the official Newspoetry mission
statement:
