Circulars

The web site Circulars was founded on January 30, 2003, to provide a focal point for poets’ and artists’ activities and reflections on the impending invasion of Iraq along with the politics of the media and civil liberties issues. Its format is a multiauthor weblog or “blog.” The HTML design was based on a generic Movabletype template with customized coding added for the comments and archives sections. Original elements of the design included an unambitious header graphic and a Flash insignia—a vertical cylinder of rotating cogs that, when individually clicked, adopt different angles and sizes, courtesy of the freeware Flash site levitated.net—which I superimposed over Guy Debord’s collage map of Parisian flows, “The Naked City,” in reverse black and white. Circulars was housed as a subsite of my web site www.arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, though as a distinct entity. (Indeed, for the first several weeks, www.arras.net did not even contain a link to Circulars.)

(Source: First paragraph of Stefans' book chapter "Toward a Poetics for Circulars" (2006))