1. Brian Droutcour explained what poetry was going to be in a "new media" context. The web has many outlets for literati -- the equivalent of small press publishing -- as well as online versions of established academic journals that continue a tradition of writing and evaluating poetry. So what was an "art and technology" website going to bring to the table in terms of redefining or recontextualizing the poetic narrative impulse? In a cogent essay, Droitcour traced the origins of "new media poetry" back to the early 20th Century avant gardes, in particular experiments in cross-mediation by Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and others, and then forward through the '50s and '60s with the visually-oriented concrete poets and verbally-oriented conceptual art movement, to more recent blurrings of media in '90s net art. Building on these foundations, Droitcour championed a group of verbovocovisual poets working in electronic media today, such as Erik Stinson.
2. Droitcour's efforts were met with skepticism, and almost no one covered his "wordworks" project for several years. The persistence of his vision eventually convinced critic Kyle Chayka, who covered Droitcour in the magazine Artinfo with a begrudgingly sympathetic analysis. "I wasn't going to just rubber stamp this," said Chayka. "It took many, many posts before I was convinced that Droitcour was onto something."