XML Poetry (for Webartery)
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0
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PLATO
collaborative writing
after school
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1
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Halloween 2002
Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services
All-Staff Meeting
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some strange affliction overtakes me
and I can no longer follow the bullets
an entire caste of people
is losing the ability
to address a room of people
without a screen behind them
administrators making 100K who would lose a high school debate
the best thing our organization can do
to improve our
website's search engine ranking
is to stabilize our name and URL five years ago
grandfather it deep into search engines
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I dream back to 1998
endless lists scrolling on monster dot com
musical jobs, even for English majors
cynical people made money
optimistic people made money and debt
when the bottom fell out we had the cards in our hand
in the beginning and the end the web
was about giving
things away
whether or not it was a good business idea
and content
a filthy word I use here to mean
< a href=http://spinelessbooks.com/discgolftour>
unique, well-structured, (alphanumeric) information </a>
of persistent interest to somebody
clean simple code
good writing
above the murmuring speculations of Owl Creek
the noose snapped, the dream awoke
the dot com era hung limp
GAME OVER
to artists and other content providers the shock brought relief
it would no longer be about putting an idea out there and seeing
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if it would float
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it wouldn't float
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swimmers only
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X
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Hairless and singed
Handcuffed to the network
A microscope slide
Irradiated by bad language
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The CIO has found a dead link
but nobody knows where
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Here it comes
Here comes your 19th 3-alarm fire
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Take this
My service
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2
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1996
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
a plan whereby a troupe of performers would sit each night
in someone's office before a server
waiting for an HTTP request
at which point we would spring into action
30-second song, webcam snapshot
low bandwidth unique almost synchronous performance for the lucky browser
busking for some kind of electronic currency
that was going to be the fall of the dollar
.
visionary
a stillborn IPO weeks ahead of its time
good thing the plan never came about
a one-line webclient script could
have pinged us until we keeled
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would rejected enthusiasm for this
quixotic theater of the virtual
be instead channeled into NSA-funded
cryptography and surveillance research?
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hi NSA
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3
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November 15 2002
Presidential Tower Fourteenth Floor
9:00 AM
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meeting with the sexagenarian
telecommunications customer service coordinator
me explaining the beauty of Dreamweaver's
site-management tool
Microsoft Office will bury us
what the hell is happening to me
overlooking the corner of Coca-Cola and Taco
Bell
Six summers ago I lived at the Dreamtime Village
shared a beached schoolbus of good anarchist literature
with someone whose love I was determined to misunderstand
shirked permaculture
scribbled six-chord songs for baritone ukelele considered conservative
filled notebooks with wine
I thought And made too much of hypermedia
and
too little of dodecaphonic music and rehearsal
HTML was all business and technical writing to me
understand that I hung with a disciplined crowd
just about our favorite thing to do was go someplace pastoral, unglaciated
and get really uptight about language
but I liked the books liked the books
maybe I'm slowly getting it
CHARACTERIZATION OMITTED
with Lyx & Patch deep one magical West Lima night
I listened to practiced community builders compare notes
for a few hours I didn't think about my masters
thesis FU: Formerly Untitled this
was a conversation about
life subsuming text but
only if you lived
good to be reunited under conferenceroom fluorescence
devoid of affiliation with any accredited institution
we sat in the back and listened to a talk about the Body
while on Zon's powerbook
spectral zebras emerged from the cycloptic eye of a
television
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whose body
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4
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i sing:
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dear editor, not to be a prima donna
but i notice the images on your site
have missing alt tags
i ask you:
what about your visually impaired readership?
i mean think of it:
there are no good English translations of Jandl
available in Braille
not even Gertrude Stein
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the web opens up vast areas of scholarship
to serious readers who cannot see
don't you think you should provide a text alternative for your flash navigatio-
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i sing:
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dear editor, six months ago i emailed you to ask whether you intended to use the submission i sent you and whether you yet knew whether you were going to publish it in print or on the web or both or neither
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just curious because you see
i need to get my cv in order because
the doctors say i have maybe five weeks left to liv-
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i sing:
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dear editor
the paragraph you wrote shows
you read and thought about the piece
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thanks-
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i sing:
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dear editor
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last night me a friend in hong kong and a mole at Adobe
hacked into your server
to repair a typo in a PDF
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best,-
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5
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but fuck all that
i see where this is heading
this whole web art e new hyper media text thing
and if you're astute maybe you've noticed it too
i'm telling you people right now
the literature of immortality
is all about XML poetry
separating form and content
the text the tags the
stylesheet and the device that renders it appropriately for a given platform
browsers cellphones caves virtual reality goggles poetry
computers you wear as jewelry
print on demand book vending machines in every cafe like literature
jukeboxes or that electronic ink they promised us
dynamically generated XLS using
cookies to track the movements of the readers
subtlety and effect
a new artist
think of it
the skill of some programmers to beautifully render XML poetry
famous coders sought after stylists
imitated for centuries
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<poem style=ornate>
<title>
Do Not Go Gently Into That Foo
</title>
<stanza>
<anguish>
<metaphor source=insanity target=love>
<confession>
<image>
<voice style=solemn>
O! World
</voice>
</image>
</confession>
</metaphor>
</anguish>
</stanza>
</poem>

their meticulously nested, indented
tags the stuff of legend
like the great bookmaker Alvin Doyle
Moore or George
Clinton or Martin
Midases gleaming glass copper conduits
invisible producers of fine art

i hate to say it
because actionscript is a powerful versatile scripting language
but compared to XML poetry may be
just SWF in the pan
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think: stable, open, nonproprietary, intuitive
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we need to be etching in stone
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some corrupted data notwithstanding
Sappho had a more stable platform
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XML poetry
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this is it
this is finally finally
finally
it
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(and maybe MP3s)
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i should BCC
Wit
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tig
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!!!