I find the Internet does challenge aspects of poetry availability. To explain this, I need to offer some background. I'm not sure if you'll be interested in the perspective of an individual poetry site webmaster, but, well...

My site is http://dylanharris.org/ , currently in it's the third major version. I grabbed the URL, not for egotistical reasons, but because someone else had registered dylanharris.com, someone who's name was neither dylan nor harris. I've tried to make my site appear distinctive, if a little uncompromising. It's got some technical features that I'd be happy to bore you with off-list.

The site is dynamic, not so much televisual movement, rather constant revision. I upload versions of works as they develop. You only get the current, although I do keep the revision history offline in a version control database.

When I first decided to put my work up on a website back in the middle 90s, the great majority of poetry on the net would have embarrassed vanity publishers. There were difficult to find exceptions, such as Michael Youth's "Of A Fiery Mind" ( http://home.sprynet.com/~myouth/fierym~1.htm, link unreliable )---a Jan Sandstrom ( http://www.jansandstrom.com/recordings.html ) of American poetry.

The web infrastructure was rapidly evolving. At the time, the dominant indexing engine was Yahoo, who reputedly employed people to look at sites and index them. The early version of my site got indexed for both photography and poetry, which was quite an achievement. Another, more egalitarian approach, was the webring ( http://www.webring.org/ ), where groups of people got together and connected their sites together. Most poetry webrings lacked editorial control and contained drivel, but there are so many rings you can find the occasional sophisticated content. I'm very glad online magazines have appeared and developed.

As the web evolved, there were some very significant changes from my perspective as an online poet. In particular, the way-back machine ( http://www.archive.org/ ) which is the US's Library Of Congress Internet Archive, and the google search engine's cache, both mean that a site, if indexed, can be found and explored long after it's been taken down. Once a poem is on the net, it is there for anyone to see, forever (unless you go through the American courts and take out the appropriate injunction). You cannot "unpublish" your poetry just by taking a site down. The web is not ephemeral.

Well, this isn't quite true. I'm not sure how long Google keeps it's cache, but I don't believe it's forever. The Way-Back machine got overwhelmed by the growth of the web, and now restricts itself to US sites, and reputedly misses much. Other national internet archives are apparently in various stages of construction.

If a site is potentially available to everyone forever, it's daft to pretend otherwise. If I put my poetry up on my website, and the site gets indexed or archived, then I've lost control of the unavailability of my work. What do I lose by doing this? Well, I'm not exactly an overwhelmingly published poet, unlike most of you guys. Even if I were published, I doubt, somehow, I would gain exceptional riches from the privilege (please, please tell me I'm wrong). So, actually, I don't really lose anything.

So what I've done is copyleft all my work on my site, using a Creative Commons Licence ( http://www.creativecommons.org/ ). This gives other people the right to copy my work, to make derivatives of it, and even to commercially exploit it, provided they preserve these rights and attribute me as appropriate. I do have deeper reasons for doing this, such as hinted in http://dylanharris.org/poetry/early0s/copyleft.html . It's akin to an artistic version of GNU's GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/ ), the licence that pins the ethos of Linux, and the Internet's software infrastructure. I do wonder whether this licence, and it's implied opportunity for uncontrolled collaboration and derivation, might have interesting consequences---the GPL certainly did. I'd like to explore this more.

Having said all this, it's not the poetry that gets the hits on my site. I've committed photography in the past, including erotica, so I expected those photographs to dominate traffic. They did once.

Many years ago, I knocked out some music, on a Commodore Amiga. I've put those tracks up too. They are technically poor quality---I'm not commenting on their artistic value---so I couldn't charge for them. But they are dominating my site traffic, especially http://dylanharris.org/music/walk/rock.mp3 . This has rather surprised me. But, I'll be honest, I'm getting sufficient traffic now, without any promotion, to make me wonder whether I should approach the lunatic fringe of the recording industry.

I don't get many hits for my poetry. I believe this is because I have no name, no one's going to look for my work specifically. Many of the people on this list are collected, people online around the world are more likely to look for them, they would get more interest. But whether the potential interest is worth the consequences, particularly the loss of control of poems published online, that is something for them.
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