What I find interesting about poetry on or via the Internet are these
things:

(1) It provides a universal library. In my teens in the 60s in a small
town in Somerset, first exploring poetry, I gathered what I could from
bookshops & the library. I would have welcomed the possibilities opened
up by the Internet, and feel what I would scavenge in a similar town
from similar available printed resources now would be more limited. I
envisage my younger self as the person I am aiming at with my own
website. I am delighted when I sense this occurring - with readers who
may be in Asia or USA.

(2) A curious dialectic between the transitory and relative permanence.
With an optimistic view of the future (& confidence in the relatively
simple & flexible nature of HTML), what is on the web could remain for
as long as the physical life of any book - maybe beyond.

Equally, anything on the Web can exist there for any period of time one
likes - can develop change & alter, exist as a structure in time in a
way a book cannot. Can be a performance.

(3) Hyperlinks enable non-linear structures to be created. I know,
there's a lot of life yet in linear structures - but I find it
artistically fascinating to complicate structures of meaning & write
poems that are impossible to publish as books. This predates my
experience of the web, which so far as I am concerned provides a
realisation of a tendency I have been aiming at as a writer.

(4) It removes artistic dissemination from Commodity Culture. Poetry
publishing is on one level (the commercial one) a minor adjunct to the
general media industry and is subject to inexorable tendencies towards
complete commodification of the product, & replacement of the poetic
producer by constructed images blending celeb & bankable performer
(that's what really successful New Gen poets will end up as, at least in
their publishers' dream). That is the direction all publishing and media
are heading. A direction in which poetry is a very marginal component.
Non-commercial funding merely adds a banal nonartistic social agenda to
this.

On another level - and one members of this list are engaged in - poetry
publishing is plainly a heroic, generous, principled & I would suspect
economically suicidal activity (pause to thank various people for their
efforts);  but that preaches largely to the converted, and will be
subject always to commercial pressures.

My website costs 56 pounds per annum (computer I would have anyway for
work). I need never consider the cost of production; yet reach a wide
audience. The Web itself exists on the basis of networks of free
exchange (as Dylan Harris has indicated). I just love the politics of
this, and the possibility of removing poetry from the commercial nexus.

Oh, and the academic nexus also. I don't need any form of permission,
from the controllers of monetary or cultural capital. Their power is
undermined. Hopefully, the sorts of poetic production possible are
altered by this, and the relationships between poets and readers
altered, in ways that are evolving and are not yet fixed.

Such utopian optimism! But I do find the possibilities of the Internet
so much more than those of a  self-limiting Small Press World.

(5) Books are at present & for the near future more enjoyable objects to
read, and fulfil a need (possibly perverse) to own as well, I'll give
you that.
--
best wishes

Peter Philpott
(www.greatworks.org.uk)