Banango Lit

Introduction
The Poetry by Emily Dickinson site has been officially live for over 2 months, so I think it’s high time for a critical evaluation and reflection on how the project has fared. First, some background. PBED was the brainchild of Steve Roggenbuck. The initial stage took place starting in mid-March of this year. Steve posted about his idea for a collaborative poetry project. This post invited people to contribute by: tweeting with the hashtag #poetrybyemilydickinson and/or joining a remix/editing team. The goals of PBED are mentioned at the bottom of that post:
 

please help me do this and show that (1) poetry can be not boring (2) our community is powerful enough to google bomb a phrase like “poetry by emily dickinson” and hijack 50k visitors per month (3) twitter and blogs are not worthless for writers, they are the way of the future and if walt whitman was alive today he would dominate tweetdeck

So these are actually 3 pretty coherent goals that we can use as criteria to assess PBED. At the same time, these are only a few aims that Steve mentioned in his initial post, and I think other goals can be attributed to the project, which can also be used as metrics. Steve, PBED is your baby, but I think you’d agree that as a collaborative poetry project the aims of its participants can be grafted onto it in good faith. I’ll get to this below, but the description of the project on the PBED website is a little different than the one stated in the original post.


The Project Begins
So people started tweeting with the #poetrybyemilydickinson hashtag in March. There were really no parameters on its use. Some people used the hashtag as part of their tweet, like the example by walter davis that Steve gives in his post: “poetry by emily dickinson is really inspiring me to be creative.” Other people just appended the hashtag to funny, poignant, confessional… tweets. Here are just a few of my favorites from the first batch back in the spring. There are tons more that made me smile, or think.
 
tbimusic: Exhausted by cursive handwriting and critical thought, we turned to mixtapes and overturning trash cans.
 
kumquatparadise: love anything that exists

whatisbenseanor: Please read this and understand I own nothing.

I think the viral aspect of the hashtag campaign was pretty successful. Not giving a ton of details about the project was a good move (as we saw, Steve’s first post listed a few aims, but they were brief and located towards the bottom). It piques people’s curiosity and gets them in on the game, even if they’re not exactly sure what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. Bobby, the merch guy for Polar Bear Club, participated and still tweets with the hashtag. He’s not in the (alt) lit world as far as I know, but he’s a friend of Matthew Thompson, who is, and who also participated. I guess it gets some people in, anyway. Some of my friends got annoyed, and I wasn’t even tweeting with the hashtag that much.

In addition to the hashtag campaign, one of the earlier stages was the remix/editing one. Anyone who was interested could participate in this stage. This is how I met my lovely talented friend Justin Carter, and it led to the founding of Banango Lit. Every few days, Steve would email out a batch of recent hashtagged tweets to use as raw material for remixes. People approved tweets as a complete poem, combined various tweets into new poems, or used tweets to make image macros. People had different ways of making remixes: Rod Naquin did acrostics, Veronika Dikoun selected parts of tweets and randomized them in an Excel document, I picked some tweets that I liked and then went through the lists trying to build a poem around them.

We also had some good discussion on the aims of PBED and how best to execute the project. The idea of having the team edit/remix each other’s remixes was tossed around, but ultimately there was only one iteration of editing. I would have felt weird messing with other people’s remixes, even if none of the original material was theirs. That’s a testament to the legitimacy of the remixing of this project: at least for me, it fostered a sense of ownership. My poems might have been compiled from other people’s tweets, but making the poems really felt like creative work. And this is borne out by the fact that different team members’ remixes, and the remixes submitted after the site launched, have distinctive styles. The PBED poems aren’t all just mishmashes of random tweets thrown together. They are poems.

Legitimacy of Twitter
This is a nice place to address one of the stated aims of Poetry by Emily Dickinson: “twitter and blogs are not worthless for writers, they are the way of the future.” So I feel pretty emphatically that what I remixed is poetry, and I regard the submissions to the proper website as the same. I think there’s a tension of sorts between the crowd (of tweeters) and the remixers (as authors). Every remix on the website credits the authors of the original tweets, as well as the remixers. I said in the previous paragraph that I felt ownership over the poems I compiled (what’s the proper verb to even use here? wrote? remixed?). If you know me and you know my writing style, you can definitely tell that the poems are mine (which is perhaps even too bold a statement, considering none of the original tweets I used are mine). At this point, I know Justin’s writing style pretty well, and I can definitely tell that his remixes are his, especially as compared to some of the later poems submitted to the website. But….the tweets all came from other people. I guess this qualifies PBED poems as flarf, though I never really thought of them that way. I think the collaborative angle is a better/more essential one than flarf. Bringing this back to the stated aim though, I think PBED has viably shown that Twitter—specifically, the culled tweets of people around the world—is a productive medium for creating poetry, or at least the building blocks of poems. The collaborative nature of PBED amplified this stated aim, emphasizing it more powerfully than if Steve or Justin or I had just pulled a bunch of random tweets together from anywhere.


Collaboration
Continuing with the development of the PBED project, people continued to tweet sporadically with the hashtag. It quieted down after the initial post-announcement surge, and editors emailed one another their remixes through mid-May, with the pace of our activity also slowing.

The website was finally launched in late August with little buildup. It features a feed of recent #poetrybyemilydickinson tweets, 3 simple directives to get people to participate (tweet and remix), and of course the poems. It also has this explanation of the project:

Poetry by Emily Dickinson is a poetry project promoting active participation in creating literature. It’s an effort to steal Google traffic from a dead writer & redirect it to living writers collaborating online.

That’s some pretty loaded language: “stealing” from a “dead writer” (not even a poet!), with the “living writers collaborating online” implied as superior to the dead one(s). So here’s the thing: I don’t agree with this description of the project. I think it could be described more accurately. I mentioned the tension between tweeters and remixers, which I felt as the latter, but there’s also a distance between those two. The project’s collaborative for sure, but ultimately the poems I compile are distinctively mine because I’m the one with editorial control over which tweets I use and how I choose to organize them. It feels like there’s some kind of a void between people tweeting with the hashtag and people remixing those tweets—which is NOT to say that there’s no overlap between those two groups, but that the two processes, of tweeting and remixing, seem separate from one another. Whereas “living writers collaborating online” implies more of a network type of process. Let me try to illustrate my point:

There’s probably some more overlap between the tweeters and remixers, but the point here is that, as someone who’s predominately on the far end of the remixing side, there’s a whole cohort of tweeters who may even be fellow remixers but who I’m only interacting or collaborating with in a limited sense. They tweet. I take their tweets and do things with them. Those processes are separate. Then you have this:



This drawing above is meant to represent collaboration in a fuller sense, of the sort implied by the PBED description of “living writers collaborating online.” I started this drawing with a simple grid of vertical-horizontal lines, but realized it needed more. Bear with me here: the lines are people, ideally both tweeting and remixing, and the orange spots represent their collaboration with 1, 2, or even more other people. This drawing displays interconnectivity, cross-collaboration…look, my metaphors are kind of hazy, but here’s what it maybe looks like: I tweet, Justin tweets, JDA Winslow and Poncho Peligroso and Stephen Tully Dierks tweet. Justin and I pick our favorite tweets from that pool, and we build a poem up, together. This raises the degree of collaboration. PBED is to be highly commended for the actual process displayed in the first image. That’s already more collaborative than the traditional process of poetry writing. But the collaboration aspect could have been taken further. I liked the first stage in the spring, the feeling of working with other people on the project. Maybe more could have been done to foster microcommunities of project participants. Maybe we could have done some positive social engineering, game-ified the process, provided some sort of incentive for people to work together to create living literature.  Maybe it’s not too late to do that. Justin and I (fake) met because we were both initial editors on PBED. Banango came out of PBED—the first stage of it. That’s awesome, and I want to do more to encourage strangers to collaborate, because great things will come out of it.

Reach
Another aspect of PBED that I want to address is the reach of the project. I don’t have detailed analytics on our audience. But roughly, from what I can tell by who tweeted, submitted remixes, and liked/reblogged the Tumblr posts, we got a lot of people inside the alt lit community to participate. We also brought in some people outside that community (like me, I guess) and got them to participate in various aspects of the project. We probably also annoyed our followers a lot with the constant #poetrybyemilydickinson tweets. One of the things that’d be neat is if we got even more outsiders to participate, or at least piqued their interest in the project—I’m talking the sorts of people who hate poetry. This links up with two goals that Steve stated in his original post: showing people that poetry can be not boring, and Google bombing the phrase “poetry by emily dickinson” (the latter of which is also listed as a step on the website). Kicking that phrase up in the Google search results is a sure way to ensure more visitors to the site and hopefully more participants. This step of the project hasn’t been emphasized much, but it can be done in the future. As for the other goal, of making poetry fun again—I’d say PBED is pretty successful. I enjoyed writing my remixes. One of the challenges PBED poetry (and flarf, and alt lit, and avant-garde, and experimental poetry…)  faces in drawing in outsiders is that they’re turned off by traditional poetry, but don’t consider this sort of material “legitimate” or “literary” or “serious.” That’s beyond the scope of this dissertat post, but one tactic is to expand the explanation of the project on the website. If we explain what we’re doing better, people might be more likely to pay attention. Draw them in with the bold statement about stealing traffic from a dead writer (maybe…), then sit them down and tell them what you mean.

Also, this:



Pacing
Now that I’ve discussed the 3 aims from Steve’s original post and the website description of PBED, there are just a few more things I’d like to mention. Stay with me, readers. One item of concern is the pacing of the whole project. There was a bunch of tweeting when PBED started in the spring. Understandably, the rate of that slowed. Then, when the website launched, there was more tweeting, and a whole slew of submitted remixes. Now, we’re only getting sporadic remixes, and very few tweets (though still some!). It’d be good to keep PBED from petering out entirely and periodically spur interest, getting people to tweet and submit remixes again. Maybe bringing in more outsiders would foster sustained participation. Maybe doing network-style collaboration would also keep the project fresh for participants.   

Original Works
One last issue is original poems. We got some submissions to the website that didn’t seem to be made from any of the #poetrybyemilydickinson tweets. Justin, Steve, and I all had different opinions on whether to publish these original works. On the one hand, it kind of dilutes the mission of PBED and isn’t in the collaborative spirit of the project, especially if submitters had already written the poems and were just looking for a public venue for them. On the other hand, if they were impelled to write original works because of the frenzy of PBED activity, that’s awesome, and we should encourage such writing by publishing their poems. There’s no way for us to really tell for each situation, though, so we ultimately just decided to publish them. It seemed like those poems got less likes and reblogs, but there could be many reasons for that: the poems weren’t as good, nobody knew who the submitters were, or maybe people were just picking up on the fact that the poems weren’t remixes and responding in kind.

So?
Alright, then. We’ve made it this far. Poetry by Emily Dickinson has done a great job of getting people excited about poetry and fostering some creative work. More could be done to encourage collaboration and ensure that the project stays alive, unlike that “dead writer,” Emily Dickinson. But on the balance: well done, guys. Now let’s keep it going.