Farewell to All That: SUNY Buffalo's Poetics List Rides Into the Sunset
SUNY Buffalo's Poetics List turns 20 and this month marked the end to the popular listserv's run as a rousing discussion board for debates, queries, and group correspondences among poets across the international literary landscape. Ron Silliman posted this sweet eulogy on his blog, that—for those who are unfamiliar with the listserv—may provide a bit of useful context.
The Poetics List is coming to the end of its run after 20 years. I don’t know how many messages were posted, but as of the last round-up of December’s posts into a text file (a process that is still incomplete), the verbiage totaled more than 302 megabytes. Not an impossible quantity, it would barely take up space on a thumb drive today. Of course, it’s worth noting that when we first computerized the student records for the California Institute of Integral Studies back in the early 1980s, those records – dating back to the school’s founding as the California Institute of Asian Studies three decades before – were held in their entirety on a blazing fast Compaq PC that boasted 10 MB of capacity. This month, I read of the list’s demise on my Nexus 7 tablet, not to be confused with either my desktop or my laptop.
It’s been years since I paid much attention to the List itself, but once it had a huge impact on my life. In 1995, when I was recruited by Technology Service Solutions and given the opportunity to pretty much name my salary in return for moving to the vicinity of Wayne, Pennsylvania – a place I had never even heard of – the idea that I could continue to stay in touch with the poetry world electronically was a major element in my decision to make the move.
The Poetics List was the first poetry tool to make serious use of the internet. Prior to the existence of the net, geography really mattered in ways that younger poets may never appreciate. If, in the 1970s, you were a post-avant poet in someplace like Kent, Ohio or Tucson, Arizona, you were at a serious disadvantage. The relationships articulated in a collection like In the American Tree, let alone The New American Poetry two-plus decades earlier, were almost entirely face-to-face, which meant that the anthology was really representing a discussion then going on in three metropolitan areas: the SF-Bay Area, New York and Washington, DC. When I first published the book in 1986, I got serious blowback from several of the poets – at least a quarter of the contributors – for including a writer, Tom Beckett, whom nobody had spent much time with in person. The absence of poets from the Chicago & LA scenes, both in the Tree and The New American Poetry, can be attributed to the same geo-centric phenomenon. In the 1980s, we were just 20 years beyond Jack Spicer’s prohibition of the distribution of the magazine J anywhere east of the Oakland hills. Indeed, Leland Hickman used to complain that he got protests from many of his compadres – the exception seems to have been Bill Mohr – for including poets who lived east of the Valley & north of Santa Barbara in Temblor, a journal that wasn’t begun until 1985. [...]
Rest in Peace, Poetics List.