Poetry has a reputation as a masochist's medium: it is writing for a small audience, with little hope of success and even less chance of widespread fame. In its cliché form, it appears in slim books in small runs, passed reverently between readers. So what becomes of the quiet scarcity of poetry when it hits the loud anarchy of the Internet? 

If “Internet poetry” is indeed its own genre, then a few possible examples come to mind. The Tumblr Internet Poetry publishes multimedia mash-ups, text-based work, and found screenshots by Internet-active poets. The current craze for Horse_ebooks, a Twitter spam robot that somehow started spitting out provocative phrases culled from its pre-loaded digital libraries, also speaks to in an interest in found writing online. Avant-garde literature blog HTMLGiant has published intermittent poetry projects. Poet Tricia Lockwood (whose work has actually appeared in print) plays with spam language and Internet culture in her poems and off-the-wall tweets. Poetry on the Internet is a beautiful, informal, and chaotic mess. But it might be getting one step more formal with a new publishing project.

On January 10, new media non-profit and online publication Rhizome posted a letter from its newly appointed poetry editor Brian Droitcour, who is also known as a writer, curator, and critic of new media art. In the post, Droitcour announced that the Web site would begin to publish poetry features on a semi-monthly basis, highlighting textual work by practitioners who also create art online. He readily agreed to an email Q&A with ARTINFO discussing Rhizome’s new initiative and the state of Internet poetry — and then returned his answers in rhyming verse.

Some of the first ever meta-critical Internet poetry can be found below, and it touches on the creative possibilities of spam, the breaking down of boundaries between visual art and writing, and Internet art’s necessary dependence on the written word. (After perusing Droitcour's poem-responses, move on to the poetry editor's first selection, a series of text poems, images and GIFs by writer Erik Stinson.) 

How did your appointment as Rhizome poetry editor come about?

It was a self-appointment.

Just something I proposed

Because my interests thither pointed.

No one was opposed. 

Poetry is a very traditional medium when it comes to publication — if it’s not printed in a book somewhere, it doesn’t officially exist. You’re the poetry editor of a Web site. Is “Internet poetry” a discrete medium? Does the term have a separate significance from “regular” poetry?

The poetry of internet is — yes, indeed! — a thing.

It makes the software shimmer and the algorithm sing.

It is a specter in the message, a splinter in the code:

It is a thing.

A poem online don’t gotta be no sonnet or no ode!!

It might just be a tangy burl that auto-complete done wrote.

It might just be a sour tweet when something odd was glimpsed:

It is a node

Where the poignancy of the ephemeral meets the speed of Mbps,

Where a concrete poem’s concrete chips the silicon of chips!

You might consult AI no wiser than Amazon or Shazam

and — :D — a poem slips

Out. Spout, spam bot! Your jumble can the net-poet enjamb,

So string those random strings of words with all the spammer’s RAM!

A poem could cuddle with a Lolcat, sparkle on a Blingee…

Who gives a damn

If it is printed? Save a tree! What matters is the dingy,

Human smudge on the machine that sets the mind a-tingle.

The cyber-poem: A spark. A key. A stroke. A buzz. A ping…

“Internet poetry”—

It is a thing.

In your introductory post on Rhizome, you note that the poetry publications on Rhizome will be tagged “wordworks.” Could you define wordworks?

a coinage beyond genre,

tagging writing’s traces

You seem to be most interested in poetry that’s made by artists on the periphery of their practices. Are you also going to try to work with self-defined writers who work online, or is the focus principally on artists? Does that distinction impact the final poetry work at all?

You see, the “wordwork” wants to claim

A space past discipline. A name

Has little impact on work you use

It to describe. I will confuse

The artists with the poets with the tools

They use to type—heed not such tags!

A label is a crutch to aid the tools

Who speak in hype (newfags) :P

[Ed. “newfag” is a 4chan-derived term referring to users new to the image board and not acclimated to its politics and norms]

In the Rhizome post you write, “It’s harder to make work online than on a canvas without touching problems of language. The internet may be a medium of visual culture, but the keyword is what finds the image, the tag brings you back to it, chat spreads it.” That last sentence is pretty poetic in itself. How does the need for text or the textual nature of the Internet impact artwork made online?

It’s partly the textual nature of the internet but also the pervasiveness of metaphor. I can’t rhyme anymore, sorry! The screen is a desktop. The desktop is covered in windows. This window is a web page. Metaphor powers poetry. Metaphor powers interfaces, and I think a lot of the interesting art and writing made to be displayed on computers is, on some level, bouncing off those synchronic substitutions.

Who are some of the practitioners of Internet poetry or artists working with text online you’re hoping to showcase?

RAFO [Ed. “read and find out”]

Are there any other venues or publications putting out Internet poetry that we should be looking at?

No, just Rhizome. 

Net Work is a column exploring the state of contemporary new media art and its practitioners by ARTINFO Assistant Editor Kyle Chayka. Follow Kyle on Twitter at @chaykak or email him at kchayka@artinfo.com.