Katherine Parrish

The past couple of weeks have been so busy, (and zombifyingly hot), that I am only now getting to writing about my experiences at ELO 2025, a conference organized by the Electronic Literature Organization.

In Friday morning’s keynote, Scott Rhettberg, one of the founders of the organization and the first executive director, told an “unexpurgated rock’n roll history” of the ELO. I love these kinds of histories, and even when I was knee deep in the hoopla of digital poetry, I was participating in other conferences, conversations, so I really didn’t know this story.

But I was very familiar with The Unknown, a hypertext novel co-authored by Rhettberg, Dirk Stratton and William Gillespie, published in 1999. I’m pretty sure I came across it because of Gillespie’s work. He would later write, with Nick Montfort 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words – the constraint and achievement gave me immense pleasure! And I had loved The Unknown, and had forgotten all about it- and look, there it is! 25 years later!

The ELO does such important work curating, preserving and resurrecting works of electronic literature (all those Flash pieces!) in its series of anthologies.

( Were it not for this work, I wouldn’t, for example, be able to revisit Brian Kim Stefans’ Dream Life of Letters, which, when I first saw it in 2000 at the e-poetry conference, moved me to aesthetic tears. I still find it aesthetically arresting and beautiful, but in revisiting it, I’ve been feeling a bit twitchy about it as a response to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s first response in an online round table discussion of an essay by Dodie Bellamy, a response that Stefans calls “nearly opaque.” I’ve been trying to track down the original conversation, which took place on the SUNY Buffalo Poetics listerv.)

In the paper I presented at this year’s conference, I drew attention to the increased complexity of the indexing system in Volume 4 (June 2022):

Our understanding of authorship in computer human generated poetry is necessarily more complex and broader when the authors themselves are more varied and diverse.  It seems blindingly obvious, but our conception of the author is, of course, influenced by the authors we know, and those that are represented to us.

The ELO anthology, volume 4, published in 2022, expanded its index. to include the wonderfully amorphous category “identity.” Under this umbrella, we find a contributor’s nationality, language, geography of origin, but also markers of gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ability….


Volume 5’s publication is immanent. And I’m looking forward to seeing how its shape evolves to carry these brave new works.