BACKGROUND INFORMATION

 

Chicken Soup for your Corporate Ass was published the 20th August 1999 as part of a series called Newspoetry. The co-author, William Gillespie, decided to write a poem a day about events in the news just to, as he said, “make himself feel better” (Ahten, 2001).

 

For this project, William Gillespie, had the help of other writers, in this creation, in particular, Ruth Wyman is the co-author of the hypertext. Unfortunatly, it was hard to find personal and profesional information about her on the internet.

 

In order to have a greater scope of what CSCA means within the Newspoetry project, the Newspoetry site has been throughly searched and, since it has not been updated for a long time, many of the links contained in it do not work or do not exist anymore. However, there is some interesting information about the author that gives us an insight of what kind of readings are found in Newspoetry.

 

Gillespie coined the term Newspoetry in 1995 and made a New Year´s resolution to write a poem a day in 1996. He published his poems in “public boards, tip jars, departamental mailboxes of unexpecting college professors, and bathrooms walls” (Ahten 2001), but found difficult to accomplish his resolution because he had to juggle it with other professional activities.

 

Later on, in 1998, the project took shape when Gillespie learnt to design web pages and started to get the collaboration of other authors. In many cases this authors were unkown people to him, even lived in another countries, but participated of the project thanks to the wonderful connectivity that offers the World Wide Web.

 

Gillespie is pretty much involved in politics as we have gathered from the Newspoetry website. In fact, in this hypertext, politic and social protests motivate the writing. Newspoetry is above all, concerned with what lies behind every news: situations triggered by social, economic and political injustice.

 

 

 

                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                             

  SUMMARY       CHARACTERS           SPATIAL ANALYSIS          CONCLUSION           WORKS CITED

 

 

 

                    

 

Academic year 2008/2009

© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López

©Ana Ruth Contreras Fernández

Universitat de València Press

aconfer@alumni.uv.es