I have for some time now imagined strategies of editing, and therefore, modes of reading, that did not take as their foundation the author as discrete particule, and that, at the same time, did not submit authors and poems to the force of theme, school, or geography. Not that I dislike these forms of editing; I only wonder at their self-evidence. Nor do I dislike authors; I’ve met some and they are often great.  I would probably not go as far as certain French philosophers did in those grand and phantasmatic apocalypse years and advocate as possible or even desirable a future in which the author has become little more than a footnote to the work itself—The Process, as Kafka fondly called it. More likely than not, such an eventuality would be the prelude to a more thoroughly administered world.

Nevertheless, I do think it possible to experiment with tactical groupings between poems and poets that are immanent to the writing itself. Lacking, as I mostly do, the grand vision of some of my contemporaries, I thought that using, as the first thing that meets the eye, an index of subjects and incidents rather than a list of authors might be one way to do this. So: I have. So: you can use this to navigate the works on offer below.  There is also a list of authors for those who just want to know who’s here.

The internet has facilitated some truly remarkable journals; there is no doubt about that. But it does seem that, with a few exceptions, many of these sites retain the formal conventions of bound, printed matter. Perhaps this is as it should be; perhaps the practical trumps all here.  Whatever the case may be, consider this one experiment in modeling the kinds of shifting affiliation that are possible between poets and poems.