Welcome to the HyperText Edition of Rev. Xmos' Poems of the Day. I decided to convert this document into a hypertext format because it would give me something to do for a week or two this summer, and it would be something unique that I could add to the web. "What is this stuff?" you might be asking yourself. It is a bunch of poems and other crap that my friends and I wrote when we were attending the Math/Science/Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, MD. It is advised that you read The "Honest-to-Xmos" True Origin of the Poem of the Day for more information. Unfortunately, some of the poems are based on inside jokes, and I don't feel like explaining them. But I don't think there are too many.
We graduated in June of 1992, and I've basically been sitting on this stuff since then. We actually did publish over 50 copies of the first edition of this book when we were senoirs. The second edition exists on my hard disk, but has not been printed out. This HyperText Edition is based on the second edition of the text.
The people responsible for starting all this nonsense are Jonathan DeVilbiss and Kevin Yeh back in the spring of 1989. I think Jon disassociated himself from it pretty quickly, for a long while it was continued by Kevin Yeh and Jeff Hostetler. I became involved with it early in 1990, and became the official recorder of the poems in late 1990. Any poems in this text from before then were either found recorded in odd places around the study hall, or were recalled from memory. Many poets came and went. During 1990, Hormuzd Katki and Naoki Hirata were fairly active. Robert Hershey is also said to have active in the beginning. During 1991 it returned to mostly Kevin and Jeff. I wrote a few poems in 1990 and 1991, and became more active in writing poems in 1992. Phillip Moyer, Mehul Shah, and Sanjaya Rajapatirana also wrote some poems in 1992. During the summer after graduation, Kevin, Jeff, and I continued to write poems. During our freshman year in college, Jeff, Kevin, and I wrote some more poems, and Ken Iwasa and Dan DeCesare, who had also attended the magnet program, wrote a poem or two. Brandeis students Ford and Matt Pius wrote some poems in the spring of 1993.
The first essays to be written about the Poems of the Day were An Analysis of a Poem of the Day and The Evolution of a Poem of the Day by Jeff in the fall of 1990, when we were studying real poetry in English class. I wrote the first biography of Rev. Xmos, Who is Rev. Xmos Anyway?, in the fall of 1991 for English class. Jeff wrote Saint? and Or Sinner? for his creative writing class shortly after that. I wrote Aliens? in the early spring of 1992, and The "Honest-to-Xmos" True Origin of the Poem of the Day was written by Kevin later that spring. A Tribute to the Poem of the Day was written by Mrs. Wisniewski, who was in charge of the study hall were all this took place, and appeared in the magnet newsletter in the summer of 1992. I wrote Xmos and Roupen: A Love Story in the summer of 1992 after being inspired by a street sign in Jersalem.
All the documents about Xmos University were written by Jeff, except for the description of the logo, which was written by me, and only appears in the HyperText Edition.
The longer poems were written by Jeff during his freshman year at Oberlin.
I hope this helps.
Aaron Greenhouse, June 19, 1994
Any questions or comments: aaron@berry.cs.brandeis.edu