This repository holds work-in-progress poems written in the markdown syntax. It started as an attempt to expose my creative process (to myself and to anyone who may care to watch) and track the nature and number of edits any given version of a poem might go through. I decided to use git (as opposed to some other tool like mediawiki) simply because it makes sense to me and it's a tool I use on a daily basis. I also found it affords a level of textual simplicty that more bloated CMS style tools lose in their effort to be complete publishing tools.
At some point in the very early onset of this experiment the thought occurred to me that perhaps I wasn't envisioning a collection of poems, but rather had stumbled on to a framework for my own exploration of a technically focused twenty-first century epic poem. And then later on I realized that what I was in fact writing was a number of individual poems - something closer to the original intention of the repo. Whether or not this is a poem or a series of poems what seems clear to me at this point is that this is a definite attempt at coming up with a compositional technique that has something of the transparency of open source software. In other words, what is being explored here is not so much the poetic effect of language, but rather the poetic effect of process and technology.
This is not a collaboration project. (At least not yet.) This poem is simply me writing to myself using tools that I hope will capture the evolution of the poem from raw concept to something else. It is not intended for any other purpose than to exercise my brain and provide insight into the effects of code producing tools and web-level transparency on the eventual work. Even so, I am licensing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. What that means is that you can (for whatever reason) fork this repo if you like. You can also edit, rewrite, and otherwise use this poem in any way you should see fit. The only restrictions are that you make your resulting repository available under the same terms, that you give proper attribution, and that you do not use the work or resulting work in a commercial way. It is also my hope that should you choose to fork this repository you continue to use git for all version control and editing and Markdown for all markup. In other words, please refrain from taking this poem offline or into some other platform other than github and please keep the work in a format that will make it easy to merge back into a main repository.
While there is no formal metadata syntax at the outset of this project, I am considering using a standardized metadata format (some sort of YAML perhaps) and will update this space with that information when I have decided on what, if anything, it will be.
For more on the what and why of this all check the wiki and be sure to read commit messages - some are informative.