Revised HOW TO: INSTRUCTIONS for Invited Authors

AFTER-WORDS : I have always been a fan of the response poem, the imitation, the riff, the play off of someone else, the hommage implied in imitations, the fun of seeing the spaces where someone else's voice meets or strikes against my own, the space where two other author's voices meet or combat--in short, I adore the putting of voices into dialogue. Is this not really the history of all literature to date?

So, in the spirit of the web being a web, intricate invisible lines spidering between our solitudes, our solcial plenitudes, Sandy Florian & I (Jennifer K Dick) have decided to start this blog and send invites off to other poet friends--YOU, invité(e)s

And then what?

Two things may happen: "ZE RULES"

I) RESPOND TO A TEXT ON THIS BLOG:
You are invited to Write a text after someone else's text that is up online in this blog. Limitations?: We do NOT mean you should post a poem or text after one that is already in print in a book, as not by some poet of yore--go ahead, write those post-Milton Paradisos in the lost lands of our 21st century, but please do not put 'em here! This is for a NOW dialogue, between voices still haunting the lands of this globe, putting the present into dialogue with the present. In short: post texts after other texts on this blog, and please sign your texts with a name. Note: There are no limits to number of response texts you can post per month. Hopefully we will end up with chains and chains of texts...
OR:
II) POST A NEW TEXT to GET A RESPONSE:
You can also put up a text as an OFFERING--meaning an invite for someone else to riff of of it. Otherwise, how would there be enough texts for us all to dialogue off of? The rules regarding this are 1) not too long and 2) no more than 1 "new" text per month per contributor, at least for the moment, to see what happens.

How to TITLE POSTINGS
For responses, put "YOUR TITLE + YOUR name" in the header,

Start the message with "After..."

ie: "After Thursdays by Sandy Florian". If this post comes awhile after the original, feel free to put info in a more complete format to help us locate the original text: i.e.: "After Sandy Florian's Thursdays, posted on 4 Oct 2007. ".

Be sure to TITLE your new work and give YOUR NAME: at least first name and last initial, and not a coded posting name, please, in the spirit of open exchange. Thanks.

FYI:You will note that for indents you will need to use "......." to create spaces (at least this is my method) and color them in black from the paint grid to get visual tab-like breaks to work at all. Good luck with that! Maybe you know other ways to do this?

For new texts requesting responses, put "New: YOUR TITLE + YOUR NAME".

Then, in the message, feel free to just throw down the text, as in start with your title.

WHAT TO DO IF TITLES ARE LONG?: use part of it as headings. ie: If the title were "A METEOR OFF OF MANHATTEN" you might put "A METEOR..."!

OK, now we are all set!

The result of all this?
A poem/textual ping pong, as it were!
To be published in print format by.... who knows?
Maybe it will happen? Or at least this will be fun!

Please, respect the works of your fellow authors and do not parody or satire them in ways which may be harmful to their precious (our precious) egos! But DO still have fun and see what emerges.