The challenge of poetry! As a genre it takes the form of the first of our MIST2000 puzzles, but it has been troubling people for far longer – and enriching them! (Spiritually, that is.) Mistigris, of course, classically maintained an extensive stable of writers, supplementing them on a regular basis by simply capturing BBS arty postings that caught our fancy, dipping a fisher’s net into an ocean of words, and republishing them with credit (and, occasionally, with permission.)

Some few other groups in the underground PC artscene (eg. Blade) also maintained “lit” divisions in tandem (and collected with) their visual art departments; others, like CiA, spun them off (eg. ScrollZ) into distinct-but-related organizations. There were also a few (eg. Reality, Revolt, Revival, Candelabra, and especially the 604’s own Cenobite) lit-exclusive groups, but we were all part of one big underground artscene.

It’s hard to prove, however, since the artistic misers in charge of the PC-scene’s FTP archives refused to grant all-lit collections a tiny footprint on their hard drives. (Schtroumpf of Cenobite wrote an impassionned essay on the topic which we reprinted in issue #13 of our house e-mag Kithe.) This meant that for poets who didn’t want to write their names on water, they needed to work out … alternate hosting solutions.

An accomplished poet from the Mistigris stable responded to this straw man argument by setting up an arrangement with etext.org to electronically publish an exclusive collection of his writings, and so our cornfield king Crowkeeper earned the distinction of having his collection, “Scarecrow Poetics”, go live at that website on April 14, 1999.

The poems’ date of composition range from 1994 through to 1999, and the author’s affected diction and style make the collection uniquely his, as remarkable today as they were then – or indeed would be in any time period. Etext.org is just a placeholder now (as of 2009), and since the poetry packs never did find their way on to the Dark Domains DVD, this digital chapbook became unavailable for six years (or… forever, to anyone who didn’t go rooting around in the guts of the Internet Archive to retrieve them like I did.)

So today it gives us great pleasure to re-issue and “bring back to life” Crowkeeper’s poetry collection “Scarecrow Poetics”.

(Tomorrow we will unpack the poetry puzzle from the MIST2000 treasure hunt and your life will be doubly literarily enriched!)