The National Poetry Foundation is now the first organization to found its own Mesh:

Over forty authors from the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on poetry of the seventies have published their work using a new Still Water tool that reveals connections among different peoples’ writing. Who knew that “1973” and “John Ashbery” were on so many poets’ minds? ThoughtMesh did.

A Mesh is a subset of articles linked using ThoughtMesh software; each Mesh is controlled by an individual or collective organization, and is typically devoted to a particular topic.

A tag cloud on the NPF Mesh home reveals the most common tags across all the texts contributed by its members. Some are no surprise–”poetics” and “modernism,” for example–while others, such as “1973,” “John Ashbery,” and “erotic,” suggest themes for poets in the seventies that might not otherwise have been evident.

Since the NPF took the plunge, other organizations have created their own Meshes, including the University of Cambridge and the University of Maine. It’s easy to do, and helps anyone who wants to start an online journal or document a conference by interlinking papers published on the same or different Web sites.

So, who wants to start a Berkeley New Media Mesh?

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