So begins Mandi Nolan's three-minute oration "realtyalaska.com." But unlike most spoken-word artists, meta poets do not author their works in the traditional sense. Instead, they comb the Internet searching for "found poetry" in lines of HTML, the code used to construct Web pages. What they are after is the long lists of "keywords" used by programmers to describe a Web site's content.

Although hidden from most who browse the Web, this list of descriptive words and phrases is present in the source code of almost every site, and allows search engines to classify pages by subject matter. Search for the word vacation online, and a search engine will return a hyperlinked index of sites which contain "vacation" in an encoded list of keywords. The meta poets take their name and their material from these often whimsical lists, which are also known as "meta tags."

"Everyone on the Web is searching for something," says up-and-coming meta poet Steev Wobblie. "It's in the meta tags that the Web is trying to tell us something, to fulfill the unconscious desires of our society."

Whether or not literary critics agree with Wobblie's assessment of the poetry behind the Web, the audience is listening. On Thursday evenings at Cell, an arts and media collective located in San Francisco's Mission District, upwards of 50 young hipsters and more than a few graybeards convene to "upload" and "download" meta-poetry. The event has become so popular that organizers are planning a weeklong festival in the fall. An album of live recordings titled "meta name=poetry" is also in the works.

The meta-poetry scene gained national attention when one of its most celebrated poets, Denise Crusoe, was featured in The New Yorker magazine. Many consider her poem "collectorsnet.com/miles/ (or Miles of History)" to be one of the genre's best. The composition, which is taken from a Web site for Civil War buffs, is as haunting as it is banal:

Meta name equals keys content equals Weapons, Firearms, Prints, Music, Song, Reenactors, Living History, Rebel, Secesh, Southern, Johnny, Union, Yankee, Manassas, States Regiment, Company, Fort, GAR, USA, Grand, United, SOV, UDC, SUV, SCV, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Wilsons Creek, Booth, Jeb, Stuart, Dug, Artifact, Battlefield, Minie, Howitzer, Fuze, Fuse, Shell, Shot...

Berta Isaksen, senior editor for the Kenyon Review, credits Crusoe with single-handedly elevating meta-poetry from underground performance art to a bona fide literary genre.

"Whenever contemporary language erupts into poetic form people get upset," remarks Isaksen, "but Crusoe has created something truly inspired ... with the technological code that inundates our culture."

Others in the world of poetry have mixed feelings about the success of meta poetry. Although spoken-word performances and poetry "slams" have helped bring poetry back into the limelight, some aficionados draw the line at the reciting of computer code swiped from the Internet.

"Cut and paste as a mode of production will inevitably lead to certain insouciant vacancy," assesses Christopher Neal, professor of comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Meta poetry is a fad, perhaps, but poetry it is not."

The South to the Future World Wide Wire Service is a weekly feed of technology and media news commentary and satire published by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Quotations attributed to public figures who are satirized are often true, but sometimes invented. Some fictional statements may, in fact, be true. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental.