Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Excellence in Poetry Award Nominations
So Erica has been outed as the generation engine used for Issue 1. Not really outed. No one involved was really hoaxing. As Steve explained, the exercise was a simple spoof of anthologies promoted with the tag line, "New poems by P1, P2, P3, ... PN" where P is a poet and N the number of poets, which gets a little silly after about 40. That's all. Just that and nothing more. I, for one, was quite surprised that anyone thought that a simple conceptual piece like this was a hoax or a prank.
I'm, of course, interested in Erica's role in such projects. As I've indicated a few times in this space, I believe that computational (what is inaccurately termed digital) poetics would best be served by collaborations between artists and software engineers. And Issue 1 is a case in point. The idea and its articulation is Steve's. (BTW: A very smart and talented young man--mine was the easy part.) The technical problem with projects such as these is their need for text. 3,800 texts, even poorly written ones, would just be too much for even a crew to write in such a limited time. So Erica, or something like Erica was needed. And so she found her way into the project.
There was a time when I was actively seeking collaborators, but as I've explained elsewhere, I'm moving on now to other things. However, if anyone out there has an interesting concept, or even one that looks to be a fun thing to do, I'm open.
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P.S.: I've removed the names that were first posted here. I imagine I would be pretty annoyed if somewhere were trying to attract me to his blog just to prove he could and to waste my time. I learned what I wanted to and now can serenely return to the obscurity I crave.
Labels: poetry award
