GTA redux and Netpoetic.com

After some discussion this spring, the contributors to Grand Text Auto (including me) decided to make a change. We noticed that while Nick Montfort had kept up a steady pace of interesting contributions to the blog, the rest of us (four of whom have become parents in the last two years) have been blogging at a much more occasional pace, to the extent that it was no longer really fair to call it a group blog, since Montfort was pulling most of the weight. Nick started his own blog, Post Position, a couple of months back. This does not however mean the end of GTxA altogether. The format of the group blog has changed, and now has begun life as an aggregator of our individual blogs, including this one. Many thanks to Josh McCoy for doing a lot of work under the hood to make this possible. We’re also keeping open the possibilities of doing other things as a group, such as the exhibition that was recently at the U of I and previously at the Beall, creative projects or distribution of creative projects, symposia and such. And I think the change from a group blog to an aggregator will be interesting. In the past I’ve used this space in a different way from my posts to GTxA. Maybe more idiosyncratically, or personally. The new GTxA will likely be a mash-up of individual blogging styles. I hope that, if nothing else, the new arrangement will inspire me to blog here more than once or twice a year. I should at least be sharing some of the awesome links I share with my friends at facebook.

I’m also going to contribute, occasionally, to a brand spanking new group blog at Netpoetic.com. The new blog is focused specifically on electronic literature and digital poetics. The ringleader of the effort is digital poet Jason Nelson, who has pulled together a diverse group of poets, writers, and scholars, including Alan Bigelow, Brian Stefans, Chris Funkhouser, Davin Heckman, Hazel Smith, Jaka Železnikar, Jason Nelson, John Cayley, Juan Gutierrez, Kenneth Sherwood, Laura Borras, Lori Emerson, Mark Amerika, Mez Breeze, Michael J Maguire, Rui Torres, Sandy Baldwin, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, and Talan Memmott, to start with. Each contributor agrees to post at least five times a year, which seems like a manageable commitment. I think it will be a great way to stay in touch with the many ongoing activities of the international electronic literature community.