What's New at WDSol

Knopf and WDS Join for NPM

Give yourself a present every day throughout the glorious month of April: Receive free by email a Poem-a-Day from such great poets as Sapphire, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, Langston Hughes, and Kenneth Koch. Sign up now at the Knopf Poetry Center. WDS and Knopf are joining to publicize National Poetry Month!

New Engine Feast

As requested, and in an effort to better service our writers and researchers, WDS has boosted and look-improved the Moveable Engine Feast page. It now features a fast News Search (courtesy of Yahoo), a Britannica search, Google search, plus a convenient hypertext dictionary and thesaurus. The classic engines remain, including Metacrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and Infoseek. If you can't find it here, you can't find it!

The Inspired Polemics of B 99

SUNY/Buffalo Poetics Listserv, the Internet's largest poetry discussion group, is in upheaval again! Accusations of censorship, member's ravings filtered, and ungodlike mutterance on the part of Charles Bernstein and other admins of the list. Kent Johnson, a member of the resistance, takes to task the "enemies of free speech" at the listserv, griddling them in this issue of FlashPoint. Can what Kent says be true? And if so, is it worth knowing at all? Or is it as the Buffalo Poetics list administrator notes: "an empty rhetoric of "free speech" so twisted as to support the grossest domination ..." FlashPoint is at the center of controversy, and that's how they like it.

Nikuko, Jazz, and Infoanimism

KSDS, Jazz 88, is now available for high culture background as you partake of our new and improved blurb column on the right. We've added some real tour de force hypertextura and a few of William Logan's best crits! If you haven't already, sample the indie film sites and don't forget to subscribe to ELAN, our newletter of the gods.

Kneeling Before Dead Lines

EP editor and nonesuch poet, Joan Houlihan, inaugurates her provocative new column, The Boston Comment, by boldly facing off with the ever growing dull-prose-into-poetry movement. Line after insipid line gets typed and dubbed poetry with repeated strikes of return key. What can account for the phenomena? Press dazed poets? Ego manic delusion? Attacks of chronic fatigue syndrome? A compulsion to delete old notebook scraps? We're not sure. But together with Joan, we're protesting!

Coop Slashing With Rain and Sol

The feisty Coop cools off very little to discuss, "Ibrahim Ferrer and the Sound that is Music." Noting that Robert Frost argued for the primacy of sound in poetry, Coop procedes to make the case that the actual sound produced by chords, tongue, etc., is often irrelevant as long as poetic devices exist. Also, "No matter how important the sound of a verse is, that sound, the music of a poem, can never be isolated from the other elements that make up good verse."

Rain and Sol reviews "The Tablets" by Armand Schwerner. The reviewer, Eric Forberer notes, "... a stunning long poem that purports to present translations and commentary of a series of 4,000 year old hieroglyphic texts." And further, from Tablet V: "... is his mighty penis fifty times a fly's wing? what pleasure! does his penis vibrate like a fly's wing? what terrific pleasure!" Leave the swatter at home!

Artsy New International Lit From TLR

"She walked in briskly, so that I saw her easily from the corner of my eye. I planted my hand on the woman's thigh. I don't know why. I touched her warm nylon stocking, right where her skirt ended and her leg showed. Briefly, but long enough. Gina saw." Read the new issue of TLR to see what else Gina saw. Including, "Phases of The Moon," "Beatrice, the Sacrifice," and "Still Wearing a Sizeable Hangover."

Wrestling with the Frog Woman

5Trope A woman with eyebrows and an appropriate mole 5Trope was wrestling with a frogwoman 5Trope there are phallic astral projections, a cosmic looping, animals without backbones 5Trope to convey the point, shape the broccoli into a pyramid. 5Trope The book is my only reminder that I cannot take care of this man, this extraordinary accident, this mess.

A Poignant Display, Desire Notebooks

The Desire Notebooks, a trilogy of novellas by John High gets a new review here by Lisa Bourbeau. To quote Lisa, "Set against the brutality of a time when "Our countries are dissolving, the way paper dissolves," this is a book in which desire reveals its trembling over and over, acknowledging a physical as well as a spiritual body in the wake of earthly collisions: the collision between restraint and passion, between idea and form, between life and death.

Quarterly West, Painted Bride Quarterly, New England Review, and Ploughshares hit the lit deck running with new issues--it doesn't get better than this. And while your at it, peruse the Bowling Green CWP website for new student writing plus the always ambitious Mid American Review.

Chaps Ahoy! WDS is proud to present mini-chaps by two of our favorite literary nomenklatura, Daryl Scroggins and Anthony Lombardy.

An active daughter of Sol, Ruth Daigon, has a new book out and here's the review. Read carefully and unleash the power of credit.

The awards won't stop coming! Britannica just selected WDS a Best of Web for its Britannica Internet Guide, and the following day we were designated a Cool Site in the Netscape Open Directory for Contemporary Poetry. It's getting harder and harder to be humble.

Also, a few months ago your favorite Sol spot was also selected by Access Magazine--a Sunday news supplement which goes to millions of readers--to be in their Top 100 website listing. We've been phoned by banner ad salesmen ever since. Regardless, the top three literary 4 stars were WDS, Salon, and Slate (the latter two having enormous budgets and well paid staff). Next came Atlantic Unbound, only 3 stars!, and MoJo Wire (Mother Jones) with two. This is the best news since Yahoo giffed us with the coveted sunglasses. Not bad for an organization which receives no grants, sells no advertising, and is composed solely of volunteers. We're still crowing!

Years later we've finally gotten around to publishing a monthly newsletter, the Electronic Literary Arts Newsletter (ELAN) to be exact, and it's a hit. ELAN editor, Liana Scalettar, demonstrates how ingeniously you can amuse and provoke while faithfully delivering the latest news on the contemporary literary arts scene. The ELAN pulls no punches and dares to be unique. Take time to add your email to the sub form below. Sample an issue!