About the database poem
Collaborative writing is not new to the Web. It isn't really that new at all. People have been writing collaboratively for some time now. But the rise of the Internet makes it possible to write collaboratively in new ways. It is now possible for two people write together in real time from two different locations using technologies like email and text chat. The Internet also makes it possible to create collaborative documents anonymously. Since the authors enter their portions of a text through their own computers it is no longer necessary to know the other authors participating.
The database poem is an exploration into this type of collaborative writing. Authors contribute lines of poetry about a given topic and then begin building poems from random combinations of those lines. The results are often surprising; certainly many of the combinations result in schizophrenic, nonsensical poems, but a surprising number of combinations result in single-voiced, focused poems.