Re: Poems

Evan M. Kirchhoff (kirchh@UMICH.EDU)
Sun, 29 Oct 1995 01:18:07 -0400

Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu
> It means that this is *not* a forum for poetry. Not now, never was.

Actually, that's not quite true: I can distinctly remember receiving all
sorts of things from this list over the years, including poetry, very long
stretches of free verse, assorted stream-of-consciousness ramblings, and
(two or three iterations ago) a very lengthy dissertation on how to pick
those 5-button door locks. Also, this list was one of the very earliest
distribution points for William Gibson's poem (the lines are short,
there's no plot, it's a poem, dammit!) "Agrippa", the one that had to be
extracted from software geared to destroy it -- both in its complete
version, and (several hours earlier) in the early mangled version where
an incomplete chunk of the last section repeated about 9 times and we all
tried to say polite things about the effect Gibson hoped to achieve
through this inexplicable tediousness :)

On the other hand, I suppose one might not want to receive poems on a
daily basis from the same author forever, since by definition they're
going to be a "like them or hate them" thing, like a thread that just goes
on endlessly. But it's not like we've ever had *rules* about this.

--
Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu