The New York School on the Web [draft]

The Web comprises circulation media with elusive properties pertaining less to physical turf and communities than most other publishing categories. In this sense, the Web operates tangentially to any socio-historicized cohesiveness implicit in the term New York School. This is not to say that New Yorkers are under-represented on the Web, nor that any substantial part of the School is subsumed within more compelling new-media taxonomies. But the idea of a solidified e- or internet-tradition for voices, attitudes, and stylistics unique to New York is at best a decentralized concept, further atomized by a plethora of alternative Web offerings and competing media for delivering them.

First- and second-generation New York School Web material appears as mostly html print-media conversions of poems, photos, bios, interviews, and critical summaries, along with occasional e-media files (mostly audio). The New York-based Academy of American Poets site (poets.org) typifies the conversion model, a primary but barebones approach to Web publishing by current standards. Its four-paragraph entry "A Brief Guide to the New York School" cites principals, such as Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, and incorporates hyperlinks to the Academy's author pages, similarly modeled, and links elsewhere on the internet. More comprehensive surveys of key New York personnel are available at the EPC Author Homepage Library at SUNY-Buffalo (epc.buffalo.edu). Not many first- or second-generation poets maintain their own Web pages, although a few have posthumous sites maintained for them, Joe Brainard, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara. Kenward Elmslie's pages (kenwardelmslie.com) break from the conversion model, serving up written, spoken, and sung texts engineered for Web-consumption, images by Red Grooms, multiple audio and video files, nonlinear menu navigation, and so forth.

Among pioneer New York internet experimentalists are poet Aya Karpinska whose "arrival of the beeBox" creates graphical interfaces that extend text three-dimensionally; poet and musician Alan Sondheim, programmer of multiple e-platforms for ill-tempered personae-avatars and other trickster techno-phenomena; sculptor Janet Zweig who digitally permutes text to engender mechanical and kinetic art pieces; poet and theorist Stephanie Strickland whose early adaptations of maps, 'tiles,' 'zooms,' and other narrative iconography demonstrate methods for redistributing alphabetic text; and poet and teacher Chris Funkhouser, developer of college syllabi that integrate e-poetics and information design. With regard to e-theory building, essays by New York language poets are influential, in particular, Bruce Andrews's "Electronic Poetics" and Charles Bernstein's "Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies."

Like counterparts around the globe, younger generations of New York poets are adapting to the internet's various and swiftly evolving opportunities for Web authorship, publishing, and communications. Personal homepages, e-mail lists and weblogs are departure points for integrating texts within distinctively defined internet spaces that deploy interactive and data-rich technologies. Brian Kim Stefans's Arras (arras.net), subtitled "new media and poetics," is exemplary as a personal domain in its extensive holdings of cyber poems, often composed with Flash, Shockwave and other Web-oriented software, as well as archives and hyperlinks for diverse editorial initiatives, including his /ubu Editions, e-books by New Yorkers, among others, Caroline Bergvall, Michael Scharf, and Hannah Wiener. In turn, UbuWeb (ubu.com), curated by Kenneth Goldsmith, functions as a massive respository for historical and contemporary conceptual and performance pieces, poems, poetics texts, hyperart, audio, video and film. The re-purposing for the internet of work by such performance-oriented poets and artists as John Cage, Vitto Acconci, Jackson Mac Low, John Baldesarri, Taylor Mead, Carolee Schneeman, Richard Kostelanetz, and Robert Ashley renders their earlier audio and visual constructs as Web-compatible as freshly minted, new-media pieces by younger New York poets. Other large archives of multiple media works, Web poems, and poetics by New Yorkers include institutional sites -- PennSound and Kelly Writers House (writing.upenn.edu), Slought (slought.org), Eclipse (princeton.edu/eclipse), Poets & Poems (poetryproject.com), Poets on Poetry (twc.org) and Brooklyn Review Online (depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/bkrvw) -- and independent e-zines and e-presses sponsored by poets -- Jacket (jacketmagazine.com), Readme (home.jps.net/~nada), The East Village (theeastvillage.com), Pompom (pompompress.com), Faux/e (fauxpress.com/e), Coach House (chbooks.com), and $lavery (cyberpoems.com). Finally, among many poets from New York and beyond there is rapid proliferation of the weblog -- a diary-like website where one updates texts, images, comment boxes, and hyperlinks in reverse chronological order. The weblog illustrates how the internet can hybridize genres into a new, medium-specific entity that crosses personal and public e-spaces, a vehicle that encourages new forms of experiment to circulate, allowing for timely publication, redrafting, self-promotion, and debate.