The Umbrella Interview |
J. J. Webb, “Beau Blue” of Blue’s Cruzio Caféby Rachel Dacus
J J Webb is the editor of Blue’s Cruzio Café, a poetry zine that pairs animation with readings. The Café has hosted some distinguished poets reading their work in animation, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Robert Bly, Robert Sward, Ruth Daigon, Ellen Bass and Kim Addonizio. JJ Webb has been publishing poetry on the Web since there was a Web—even before, via Web precursors. He is an innovator always looking toward new possibilities for Internet publishing. He was among the first poetry publishers to animate readings and often does the animations, as well as working with talented artists and designers to create original poetry performance videos.Q: How did you begin with online poetry publishing? What gave you the idea? It depends on the meaning of the word “online.” If you mean the World Wide Web, the answer is 1992. If you mean the UseNet (an outgrowth of ARPANET), the answer is 1987. FidoNet? 1985. Any networked computer system? 1978. As the Engineering Manager for a small company called Computer Curriculum Corporation I helped develop computer labs for K-12 schools. Dr. Patrick Suppes, the major curriculum designer for the PLATO projects in the early seventies, started the company to produce networked computer terminals devoted to teaching kids reading, writing and arithmetic. I was the seventeenth employee hired to help him accomplish his dream. Among the subjects was ”Reading for Comprehension” and poetry was part of the course. I remember seeing Gil Scott Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” on a computer screen in one of the labs we designed and built for an inner city school, and saying to myself “Wow! This is going to make teaching poetry and learning poetry more interesting than when I was in high school.” That was even before the IBM PC made its debut. In the early eighties, I was a consultant at Ford Aerospace and got my first user account on their research computer system, which happened to be part of ARPANET. In 1987, while I was working for Lockheed, the “great Usenet re-organization” happened and rec.arts.poems newsgroup came into being. I was one of the first to start using it. In 1989, I helped start one of the first commercial Internet service providers in the country, Cruzio Communications. Mosaic came out in late 1992 or early 1993. I was asked to put together an Art & Literary eZine so our customers would have some content to view with their new toy. I started “The Hawk” and our inaugural issue featured Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Sward, Nick Herbert and other writers and poets from Northern California as well as many artists. In 1995, “The Hawk” morphed into a poetry eZine called “ZeroCity.” [ZeroCity archives can be found on Blue’s Cruzio Café.]
Oh, the paradigm shift is definitely happening. The traditional distribution channels for poetry have dried up completely over the last 75 years. Bookstores have better money-making uses for their bookshelves and publishers, never that enthusiastic about poetry to begin with, have restricted their catalogs to the dry and lifeless offerings of the participants of the MFA programs around the country. Something had to give. What with the rise of Print-on-Demand publishing, the ease of setting up sales websites, and the expansion of the audience for poetry I don’t see why it shouldn’t shift significantly. But I believe the market for poetry publications will reach way beyond print in the very near future. I believe paper and ink are just too limited for 21st century poetry. The Internet will re-introduce poetry’s audience to poetry’s oral roots. CDs and DVDs will be the form marketers will use to push poetry sales in the future, not paper and ink. My 18 year old daughter got a love poem from her boyfriend the other day, on her phone. They spend a great deal of time texting each other every day. Things like that tell me that poetry is very much a part of this century. Isn’t it grand?
It is beginning to eliminate the old-line gatekeepers. Well, not eliminate them, but make them more and more irrelevant. It’ll be interesting to see what the new gatekeepers look like. And with that the Web will begin to reshape the poem itself. Just as Slam has influenced the poem to become a more comprehensive, harder-edged entity, the web will influence it in the same manner. And of course the web has expanded the audience for poetry far beyond what anyone imagined 20 years ago.
The Café’s origin was a broadside I began in 2002. That broadside was called “Talking Heads,” a collection of a few of the poems I’d recorded over the previous 15 years. It was just me wondering if I could draw. It took two and a half years to learn enough about animation to feel like I could do it well enough to start doing other poets. I started with a couple of heroes of mine: Kenneth Patchen and Robinson Jeffers. Since I had the recordings and the permission to use them, I decided, why not? From there the Café just kind of took over and now I spend a large part of every day working on it.
Yes—many poets nowadays think poetry only happens if ink is involved. And no—many poets today are excited about the performance aspect of poetry. Those poets that long to get up off the page are very supportive of my efforts; they volunteer to participate and help me discover writers and performers who feel the same as I do.
Most still worship print. Most continue to submit manuscripts to small presses and want desperately to have them accepted. They’re desperate to have some outfit run off some small number of copies (that never find a way into more than a few bookstores) so they can say they’re published. It’s sad. But it’s the path that’s been taught for a hundred years, so what else should anyone expect?
Yep. In 1994 there were 16 million web users. Today, 1.75 billion. That’s a B—the audience for everything has expanded. Isn’t it grand?
Craig’s List killed the Help Wanted section of city newspapers. Newspapers are shrinking in so many ways. Thanks to the Internet, book review sections of newspapers are falling like flies. As well, political opinions are more diverse and livelier in the blogosphere than in the print world. Nowadays, almost every poet has a website and access to POD. Who needs a gatekeeper to decide if this work or that work is more marketable? What can the small press publisher (or even a large press publisher) offer to today’s poetry community? Nothing, actually. What’s more, they haven’t really offered anything to the community for a long time. The transition is just beginning. The Internet is only twenty years old. It will take a generation or two, I think, to really eliminate the print world’s stranglehold on defining literary merit. Maybe they’ll never be completely eliminated, but I keep thinking about those incredible, shrinking newspapers.
I can’t give any examples of significant “non-print pubs” today that can rival those of the print world. The print worlds hundreds-of-years’ head start can’t be denied. But within a generation there will be rivals. The sheer size and diversity of Internet poetry is its significance. Internet pubs which only emulate print publication and ignore the abilities of the internet, won’t be included. There are many internet pubs already, offering text and audio, that are way more entertaining than what the print world is offering. And a couple more that present text, audio, and video that are beginning to eclipse the text/audio only offerings. Poetry LA comes to mind as the most significant of those. YouTube has a bunch of poetry groups, did you know that? More and more poets making audio-visual presentations means there will come a time when poetry eZines will have to include an audio-visual section to remain competitive. Some selected videos from Blue’s Cruzio Café:
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