of Beckett scholarship, and a good selection of the texts themselves online.
And a third Beckett site—this one devoted to the scholarship—may be found
at LiteraryHistory.com.^18
Who is accessing these sites? Students, surely, but not only students or
their professors. It seems that there are actually thousands of people “out
there” who want to learn more about Beckett’s work and share their inter-
pretations of and enthusiasm for that work. And the same is true of Web sites
devoted to Rossetti and Blake, to John Cage and Gertrude Stein, and to move-
ments such as Futurism or Dada. Futurist texts (e.g., F. T. Marinetti’s mani-
festos), often out of print and unavailable, can be viewed on a beautiful Brit-
ish site called Futurism and Futurists, owned by the independent scholar Bob
Osborn. This site features all the major manifestos, artworks, photographs,
the key writings, as well as a glossary of Futurist terms. There are also related
Dada sites (for example, the Marcel Duchamp site tout-fait) and, perhaps
above all, Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb.^19 This latter Web site is a work of
art in itself. Goldsmith, trained as a visual artist and now a word artist and
poet as well, has designed UbuWeb so as to please the eye as well as to provide
information: it features sound and visual poetry that is unavailable even in
most research libraries. There are portfolios on subjects like conceptual art,
radio, and ethnopoetics; scholarly essays on different poets and artists; and
best of all, the primary materials themselves. On UbuWeb you can hear vari-
ous renditions of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, including Schwitters’s own. Or
you can hear Marinetti reciting Zang Tuum Tumb, examine the Concrete po-
ems of Haroldo de Campos, and read the out-of-print issues of the great sev-
enties avant-garde magazine Aspen.
Goldsmith is not himself an academic, and he does not apply for funding
from the NEA or NEH, so he need not compromise his values. Yet, within a
¤ve-year period or so, he has made UbuWeb an indispensable site for artists,
poets, art historians, and literary scholars. As such, poetics is attracting a
new generation of students who are coming to aesthetic discourses by the
circuitous channels of the digital media. I use the word “aesthetic” advisedly
here, for the audience in question is primarily interested in how Beckett’s ra-
dio plays or Apollinaire’s calligrammes actually function and what younger
artists and poets can learn from these examples. In the context of actual art
making, the relationship between poetry and its audience (the rhetorical)
and the examination of the poem as formal, material construct will once
again predominate. At the same time, as anyone who has used the Wittgen-
stein Archives (http://www.hit.uib.no/wab) at the University of Bergen in
Norway knows, the relation of poetry to its philosophic analogues has never
received as much attention as it is getting today.
14 Chapter 1