Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 01:40:20 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Trying to find a website where you could watch writers typing out poems

Started by Greg Torso, August 28, 2021, 08:04:40 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Greg Torso

I'm trying to find a website from probably about 2000-02 where a writer was given a prompt which I think was usually a picture and you could watch them type on the screen in real time with all their mistakes and deletions.
David Berman was featured on, which is why I've been trying to find it, I think his prompt was a kid shooting a hoop in basketball.

Does anyone remember this? I've tried searching but can't find anything.

Famous Mortimer

I like a searching challenge. So far I've found "the poem guy", dating from 2005, but he just seems to be advertising his services as a guy who'll turn up at any event and write poems for people on the spot, using his typewriter.


Greg Torso

Thanks, I'm thinking it might have been a live thing that wasn't archived. It was lots of different writers, and they were each given a prompt and the idea was you saw them write out their pieces in real time.

Maybe the internet got reset in 2005 and all things before that were wiped.

Famous Mortimer

I suppose the problem is, if the site's gone completely, it won't show up on searches, and you'll need the URL to find it on the Wayback Machine. So, it's keeping your fingers crossed that some other ancient site that's still around referenced it, and getting lucky with the words they used.

On the plus side, I've read lots of old interviews with David Berman, so that's nice.

Leon-C

Is it QuickMuse?

I searched around and found it in this article, which says:

QuoteOn Monday, the poet-songwriters were given 15 minutes to fill a blank computer screen with verse about a photograph QuickMuse provided. The idea, Gordon said, was to contrast Berman's and Roberts's poetry styles and, for fans of their music, to provide a window into their lyric-writing processes.

The results of QuickMuse contests are available online -- not only in their final form, but also as simulations of the poets' creative process. During each second of competition, QuickMuse software captures images of the poets' screens. Afterward, the website replays the images in rapid succession, revealing the poets' writing as it occurred, word by word and line by line. "[W]e suspect QuickMuse will bring readers closer to the moment of composition than they have ever been before," Gordon writes on the website.

The site itself is still up (in a newer form), but not the archives, it seems.

Nice one, Leon. If you can't find it on the site now, it's archived at the bottom of this page: https://dcbuncollected.net/

as Quickmuse poetry playback 1 and 2:

Full poem

Playback

Edit: Oh, the playback stops at 14.01 for me.

Gregory Torso

Oh My God, thank you, Leon. That is exactly what I was looking for!

And thanx, Smeraldina for that link, too. Couple of pieces of his writing I hadn't seen before or had forgotten about.