/Interview/ The Brains Behind: QuickMuse
01/08/2006 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Ken Gordon and Fletcher Moore launched www.quickmuse.com as a way to jam with famous poets. Here they reveal all
.net: What’s quickmuse.com all about?
KG: You could say that we’re here to pump a bit of culture into the blogosphere; that our site demonstrates that poetry is both a process and a product; or that our raison d'être is to bring readers closer to the act of creation than they’ve ever been before. You could add that QuickMuse is here to prove that the internet can actually change the way people write. And that we’re increasing the speed with which poetry reaches its audience. Or you could just say that we’re having some fun. Take your pick.
.net: Where did you get the idea?
KG: I’m writing a book-length essay on improvisation, and I was reading up on jazz - specifically, a book called The Imperfect Art (www.tinyurl.com/qvyzl). The author, Ted Gioia, talked about “what 20th-century art would be like if other art forms placed an equal emphasis on improvisation” and asked us to imagine TS Eliot “giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems - different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip.” I started thinking about blogs and talent-based reality shows such as Iron Chef America and thought: “Well, Eliot’s not available - but what about Robert Pinsky? Maybe he’d do some online improvisation.” As the editor of JBooks.com, I’d worked with Pinsky. So I sent him an email, he expressed an interest, and now I’m typing out answers to your questions.
.net: Why did you decide on 15 minute slots?
FM: It’s really just a convenient number. Robert Pinsky lobbied for much shorter times - as little as five minutes but that seemed a bit sadistic. What we were really concerned about was simply producing pressure. It doesn’t really matter so much if the poet finishes in eight minutes, or 15, as long as they feel that clock ticking. They don’t have to operate in rhythm, as a jazz improviser would, so there has to be another way of keeping them in the moment, and the clock does that.
.net: How do you decide on who will battle who?
KG: It depends mainly on the schedules of the poets.
.net: How do you get the poets to take part in a race against the clock on the internet?
KG: The poets who participate are brave and confident people. And they’re extremely rare. I’ve talked to many authors and most of them have said, in one fashion or another: “Are you insane?” Which is, I’ll add, a fairly reasonable response. But the ones who have agreed to play along – Paul Muldoon, Thylias Moss, Robert Pinksy, and Julianna Baggott - were seemingly born to improvise. These people need virtually no convincing at all.
.net: How has the site been received so far?
FM: The reception has been really excellent. We made the front page of the arts section of the New York Times shortly before our second event, then the Sunday Observer, and the BBC’s The Verb interviewed Ken shortly after that. There’s a slew of magazines and papers that have or will be doing stories on the site, and the tale seems to be worming its way through the blogosphere at a good clip. Ken and I have worked on several other websites in the past, and it was always a major undertaking to build up even the smallest bit of momentum, so this has been really refreshing.
.net: Would you say it’s successful?
FM: It’s off to a good start, that’s for sure. I think it’s an excellent idea, but frankly, we’ve had plenty of excellent ideas that went nowhere. This had something else, and I’ll admit that when we were putting it together, I was occasionally sceptical. Even while we were testing the Poematic (the software that does the recording and playback), I remember thinking it was pretty neat, but it’s safe to say that neither of us fully appreciated how compelling it could be until we actually saw this terrific poetry coming out of it. In a small way, I think it’s what happens whenever the right technological tool comes into contact with great artistry - I suppose Louis Lumière might have had a similar reaction had he gotten to see something like The Godfather.
.net: Who would you like to get on board for a battle in the future?
KG: Well, we’d love to get some UK poets involved. Maybe we could set up some kind of literary lend-lease program.
.net: How did you build the site?
FM: The design is just cobbled together from scans of a bunch of books I have in my house. A bit from here, a bit from there. Web design and development is what I do for a living, so there was nothing out of the ordinary going on there. The Poematic was a struggle, however. We didn’t have any particular mechanism in mind. Initially we talked about audio recordings, but we couldn’t see forcing big league poets to compose out loud. I started thinking about keyloggers, which are typically programs used for nefarious purposes - stealing sensitive information by recording all of a user’s keystrokes. So I built a prototype in JavaScript with a PHP backend. It worked, we liked it, and about four major revisions later, the Poematic was born.
.net: What’s lined up next for QuickMuse?
FM: We’ve got a lot of good poets scheduled. We’re working on others, and at some point this fall we hope to increase our publication schedule.
From the standpoint of features, we’ll be improving the Poematic for the next several months - we aim to add playback controls like pause, rewind, double and quadruple speed, more visual feedback so that readers can follow the poets’ changes better, plus Q&A sessions with poets, perhaps a bit of back-and-forth with readers if we can swing it. We’ve got other items in the works, but they’re all secret for now.
An abridged version of this interview originally appeared in .net issue 153.
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Comments
rakesh / 10/08/2006 / 20:48
want to update myself for interview
george yuen / 10/08/2007 / 22:53
=ithink the creative process is fascinating and this website affords one the rare opportunity to see poetry created!
=poetry is a great artisticform for what is actually said,as much as for what isNOT said!!
=this website brings poetry into the 21st century and makes it accessible to the masses!!!
=thank you
