And have a first person point of view,
even with this sort of banal task
of just surfing around and reading stuff in poetry
magazines or whatever.
And I think you can make a good case that it really-- there's
something very appealing about it.
And there's something that, I think,
that the web does and offer this kind
of immediate sort of payback that the page often
does not do.
That is, if it can be made fun enough.
That's the key question.
Is this going to be an enjoyable experience?
Or is this going to be an irritating experience
where we're sort of forced to have fun
and to make our own games?
And the key is trying to get readers
to enjoy the experience.
So given then, that the web is a commercial place--
not entirely commercial.
But I mean, it's really kind of gone
that way, unfortunately or not.
But there's a lot of spaces online that are primarily
commercial and are designed to make money in whatever way
or another.
Amazon is one of them.
But Amazon, as you probably know, has reviews.
Now they have video reviews because they
want to keep people on the site, user
generated content, et cetera, et cetera.
So the web offers us like hundreds of thousands of spaces
to inhabit in whatever way we choose to inhabit them.
I mean, they would prefer that we
talk about why this book is good or why this book is bad
or whatever.
But you could just use the video review capability
of posting reviews of yourself in a tiger suit rambling
on about poetry if you want.
That's totally fine.
You can use it as an opportunity to interrogate
the site that's there already.
So the web is commercial.
But that's OK.
Doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
I mean, I like bidding for things on eBay
as much as anyone.
And then many of the web's innovations
are driven by commerce, or at least that strange desire
to connect that we have in moments.
The anime porn here is--
I just picked this at random.
This isn't-- I wasn't even trying to find something good.
This is what I found.
It's extremely disturbing.
But-- but it's / it makes me happy.
I mean, we're looking for some kind of connection here.
We're looking to participate in our media.
I mean, Xtube is all amateur.
It's where people upload their own things, of course.
Because even porn is now too fake for us.
Now we need to have a more real all the time,
see also David Shields' Reality Hunger.
Then we should understand that many of these spaces are ours.
They might as well be.
They're everyone else's.
Why can't we use them for our own desires
and our own languages?
Well, you could feel free to make money on that if you like.
It doesn't have to be language.
It could be it could be audio or video or art, or art.
This is a video review that I did of Patricia Clark's book,
My Father on a Bicycle.
I have a baby fetish thing that--
it goes on for a while.
So if you go on Amazon, you can look
at-- you could look at a number of the video reviews,
many of which are just poems or sort of strange beasts
that I put together to be entertaining.
I guess what I'm trying to propose
is that we consider these as venues for publication.
And, I mean, this does-- the idea
of posting poems or writing poems,
installing them in digital spaces,
does raise questions about publication that are tricky.
And maybe, I presume it's one thing maybe
we are going to talk about probably the panel after this,
and what is--
given our ability to publish things online,
does that count as publication in the same way?
If we post-- if I post a poem on Amazon in response
to a friend's book, can I count that
as a publication for my NEA grant?
The answer is currently no.
But I don't exactly know why not.
Well I know.
I know why not.
But I'm-- but at the same time, I mean,
how important is it we publish a poem in a sort of respected
journal as opposed to getting it in front of say a couple
hundred thousand people that might look at a review
of a really popular book on Amazon?
If what we want is to read, or perhaps to read well, then
maybe we should be using these spaces
and trying to hijack people.
And then we can interrogate these spaces.
I mean, just because Amazon is this commercial beast, that's
OK.
We don't have to be stuck with what it wants us to do.
It gives us the opportunity to play with things.
And so, perhaps we'll play with some things.
Provide the material, provides constraint.
So here's where this gets a little bit more interactive.
I don't just want to ramble on.
Although I can ramble on for a really long time with you
guys about this.
I'd like to hear ideas that you have.
What spaces do you use that allow
some kind of interactivity, that allowed users to post text?
I've got a little list here.
I mean, these are all places that I've used before.
Amazon, obviously, Craigslist.
The missed connections in particular,
because people read those for-- they're such exciting
places to read.
Personal-- other personal ads, OkCupid.
OkCupid's got a really good blog.
I don't know if you read their blog.
But their blog is really phenomenal.
They do all these--
I mean you can't post to their blog.
But you can-- the blog has all these statistical analyses
of the people that post on the site.
I mean, it's stripped of sort of individual data.
They just give these trends.
And the trends are fascinating to look at.
Like what the most popular word is in a particular subgroup's
personal ads.
It's really, really interesting to look at.
They don't post that often, but you should check that out.
So certainly using personal ads as an opportunity to sort of
get the word out there in some way,
to get your words out there.
It's an opportunity. eBay and Etsy,
auction sites that allow you to post things.
I've got an auction on eBay that's been
going for about eight years.
No one's-- no one's bought it yet, I'm afraid.
And I keep paying $1 every month for my auction.
But it's sort of the output of one
of this sort of strange, poetic choose
an adventure kind of essay on that website, which
dumps you out on eBay.
And you can buy a thing there.
And if you buy it, then you get something
interesting in the mail.
This is maybe a downside of like having these really
elaborate things is no one's actually bought this.
So you know whatever I look for I probably spent $12 a year.
I've spent $96 hosting this eBay space.
So that's one.
I mean, like eBay is a place that could use this.
Anything that allows reviews, Google
reviews, Yelp, all that kind of thing.
What other places?
Bathroom graffiti.
Bathroom graffiti?
OK.
Not online, but could be.
Actually, there's a blog called Latrinalia that
just does bathroom graffiti.
Is it-- is it yours?
Bathroom graffiti--
Now, someone's writing that down.
Bathroom graffiti, definitely.
And the number of people that read the bathroom graffiti
is probably way more than the number of people
that will read any given poem.
Maybe not any given poem.
Jewel has a lot of readers.
Where else?
Other websites.
Like Flickr or photo sharing?
Flickr.
What was the other one?
Any photo sharing site.
Any photo sharing thing?
Absolutely.
What about the travel review things?
What do you mean the travel reviews?
You can leave comments about hotels or places you've found.
Like Tripadvisor or something like that?
Yes.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Good.
What else?
Odd way to use Wikipedia.
Oh.
Wikipedia.
That would be interesting.
You can make the entry title some kind of way
that you could actually make it so it wouldn't taken down.
Yeah.
Perhaps because it is an actual entry.
Yeah.
Or you could go and edit other people's Wikipedia entries
and falsify all kinds of things.
We should, absolutely.
In the beginning, it should be very controlled.
Sigmund Freud.
Yeah, I mean, the ones that get a lot of traffic,
like, they're usually pretty well patrolled.
But the lacuna, just with like smaller asides of Wikipedia
are very open, I think.
So certainly, Wikipedia.
Definitely.
What else?
Other websites that you use that you
may have an antagonistic relationship with.
Yeah?
One time, I was looking on Craigslist
on free puppies or kittens or something.
And I saw that someone had listed a free kitten
and when you click on the ad, I actually
saw a poem, a photo that they had taken of their poem.
So if you-- because Craigslist allows you to upload photos.
And it's free.
And you could do multiple cities.
Mm-hmm.
Definitely.
Craigslist is good.
There's, I'm not sure if you've seen on eBay.
One thing that people like to do on eBay,
is they will try to sell something.
And they'll try to have--
it's a weird exhibitionist thing.
They'll try to have somehow themselves naked,
reflected in the mirror, in the photo
in the corner of the mirror.
And so you can see in sort of like this curve--
this curve-- this curved image of a boob or something
like that.
And it's clearly intentional.
It's a thing that people do.
But you could also absolutely bury poetry or other kinds
of language in those.
Other ideas?
Foursquare.
Foursquare?
I don't even know what foursquare is.
You check in at locations.
So you can create your own location.
You could just create, instead of creating the Poetry
Center here, it could be a line from a poem.
And people could check in line by line into your poem.
That's super cool.
OK, I totally like that idea.
That's great.
What else?
Chatroulette.
Chatroulette?
Oh, yes, Chatroulette Yeah, especially if you're naked.
Naked with a poem.
I don't know.
I mean, that would be a little more interesting.
But Chatroulette would be great.
That's what people want, right, is
a kind of random experience on Chatroulette?
Yeah?
Online job applications?
Yeah.
That's great, actually.
That's great.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Certain graduate school applications.
You take the opportunity for the personal statement
to feel free to bust some rhymes.
Yeah?
Oh, my brother knows some people who
try to figure out when the Google Map photo
truck is going around.
Is coming by?
Yeah.
And then they put on these horse heads they try to be casual.
Yeah.
So you could absolutely-- what if you posted a mural size
poem.
It lasts for months.
They usually don't come to that same neighborhood for a while.
And then there's a website somewhere
where you can see all these people with horse heads
at a bus stop or whatever.
But you can certainly have something written.
And if you knew when that magical truck was
going to be going by.
Yeah.
That'd be fantastic.