Besides their archival function, the recordings originally served an immediate purpose: to make the readings and talks available for community and collective members who hadn't been able to physically attend the event. During the late 80s early 90s members of the collective and community often dropped in to the KSW on Friday afternoons to listen to the tapes. As such, the recordings were a successful extension of KSW's local publishing practices. But as frequent changes of headquarters and personnel brought many shifts in circumstance, and without ever having had a large enough budget to rent or buy its way into an ideal situation, it became increasingly impractical to make the recordings available in this way. During the mid-1990s Gerry Gilbert rescued the practice somewhat by recording almost all KSW events for later broadcast on his Vancouver Co-Op Radio show "radiofreerainforest". After Gilbert stopped making his recordings, and without other apparent means to distribute the material, recording of the events became something of a habit rather than a directed activity. The audio archive fell into disuse, even as it continued to grow. Since the new millenium, as the internet has emerged as a revolutionarily important new means for distributing poetry, the KSW has wanted to make the recordings available online. Aaron Vidaver volunteered his time to digitize most of the New Poetics tapes (and a number of others) in the early 2000s, but the enormous amount of time necessary to finish the project ground his initiative to a halt. We were finally able to get this project off the ground with some matching funds provided from the BC Government, which made it possible for Donato Mancini to take the time (about 4 full months) to digitize the rest of the archive.

Keeping in mind that the history, meaning, and critical context of the KSW project remains actively contested, we are posting a range of material that reflects the entire history of the school's activities, through many changes in personnel, rather than the mandate of any particular KSW administration. A look at the roster of names alone will give a picture of the wide social, literary, political scope of the KSW. As such it will also reveal the contradictions, dissonance, and dysfunction of the school that is key to its significance and longevity. We do not wish to give a false appearance of critical consensus. It will, appropriately, be impossible to extrapolate a homogenous KSW poetics from listening to the recordings available here.

We will slowly be adding as much bibliographic information as possible, including the names of all the works read and when and where all materials were published, and links to these items if they're available anywhere online. Check back for updates.