Article:

Communities/Commons: A Snap Line of Digital Practice

“Communities/Commons: A Snap Line of Digital Practice” presents a brief history of digital poetry, from the perspective of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), Buffalo, and the international E-Poetry Festivals of digital literature, art, and performance (E-Poetry). The paper engages the discipline from various perspectives, considering its relation to historic contextualizing movements and institutional mechanisms. Determining a renewed vision of E-Poetry community, it is argued, are its exuberant origins: (1) the U.S. small press movements of the later Twentieth century; (2) the activities and philosophies of the Electronic Poetry Center; (3) its self-definition as more broadly-conceived than that of any specific category of digital literature; (4) the pre-existing literary ground of Black Mountain, Language Poetry, and related practices; (5) the vibrancy of the as-then-constituted Poetics Program at Buffalo, and; (6) a “symposium of the whole”, the continued emerging importance of enthnopoetic localizations to an eventual realization of contemporary poetics. Finally, a call is made for the field being adaptable and more generous with its frames of reference. Such a breadth of understanding, it is concluded, contribute to E-Poetry’s continuing vibrancy and to a wider vision of the possibilities for digital practice.