Digital poetics at the university has an incidental categorical problem that soon becomes a prohibitive institutional problem. It is hard to tell the two problems apart, yet I think it's helpful to do so, especially in the context of expectations raised by claims for e-poetries' radical newness (such as those of Loss Pequeño Glazier, who writes in the rhetoric of manifesto that "The making of poetry has established itself on a matrix of new shores"). There is no inherently positive or constructive connection between digital poets and the academy (many if not most important contributors to the e-poetries scene are productively unaffiliated with the academy), but universities' strong network and huge server resources are alluring for artists who otherwise must beg, borrow, or steal server space from intentionally or unintentionally generous ISPs. Digital poets who find themselves in the academy tend to collaborate interestingly with colleagues in universities' information technology (IT) departments, creating relationships of a sort unusual for other poets. This transdisciplinary social fact in itself gives us a chance to urge great changes in the way we read, interpret, teach, and write poetry, but for many reasons-only a few of which I can suggest here-that change has not come. In the making of-at least taking full advantage of-the digital poetics/university connection, a first question arises: Where within the curriculum does digital poetry fit? Is it a fine art? Is it a component of the study of literature (to be listed in the English department, along with the rest of poetry)? Is it "creative writing," inside or outside "English"? Is it "communications," God forbid? Is it "theory"? Is it a comparative literature (thus stretching further the already elastic definition of "comparative")? And most compellingly, are digital poetics part of the newly developing (and relatively well funded) IT curriculum?
Once a set of taxonomic decisions is made (arbitrary but necessary according to the way universities as institutions are budgeted) another opportunity for innovation is easily lost. Funds flow most freely through connections to traditional curricular structures, such as the for-credit course, so those who want, with university dollars, to make, disseminate and encourage discussion of digital poems seek and get grants through the development of new courses or the digitalization of old ones, into which the digital poetries they make and those by others they admire can be inserted-like any block of "academic content" fitted into curricular holes or slots. These ought to be new kinds of courses, but, alas, typically they are not. (The hope or perhaps even the confidence that they can be is what drives my participation in this conference.) Funds for "web development" go to what IT administrators and some new-fangled academic deans call "content innovation." Where they are really needed is in radically different modes of reading, teaching, learning, responding, and discussion, and a revised sense of who the learners are--modes that break the rules of time and space that have long governed the medieval-agrarian "semester" or the postwar-American "quarter," both byproducts of the I-know/you-don't, I-have/you-want, I-give/you-receive, I-write/you-read structural technologies of the era of the book.