I should just say that I put up all my books/pamphlets on the Web and the
Web readership is vastly more than the number of sold copies. But I think I
have sold only one book off the Web in ten years.

And as a supplementary, cos I have moved from the Guardian to the Times,
today Felix Dennis and Simon Armitage are comparing their poetries with an
example. Out of curiosity I read Simon's Selected Poems last year and he is
a genuine poet. But Felix has no ear for language at all and he has sold
10,000 copies of his book. The ordinary public knows nothing of poetry. As
David Bircumshaw said poetry is a minority interest. Nowadays that is why it
is only read by poets. Or would-be poets. If you havent got the ear dont
try.

But regarding the Internet in which I have been involved since the
beginning. The great flurry of mags and new poets appearing seems to have
vanished. Everything is very stagnant. Perhaps I should do some surfing to
see if new things are happening. I got bored with the same old poets
churning out the same old poems.

My personal feeling currently is that the book hasnt been replaced. And the
answer to the publishing crisis must be print on demand (which is not
suitable for me personally). But who knows what the future brings. I wont
see it.



Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
 http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Green" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 1:21 PM
Subject: Poetry & the Internet


> In response to Rupert & Roger :
>
> The Internet is already , and will continue to be, a massive influence on
> the creation, consumption and even definition of poetry/word art/text
> generation, whatever. Although that old crypto-Papist techno-determinist
> Mc
> Luhan got the small print wrong he was right about the big picture and
> the
> mega mix, the global village of pillage, the medium being the
> missile/missal
> , the message as frottage,our immersive pottage... he proclaimed Joyce and
> the high priests of modernism for embodying the tropes and memes of mass
> media in their work and had lotsa pun doing it...
>
> Digi tech on the web drives this process faster and further into new
> territories.
>
> Yes, I know you can't go to bed with a cosyiMac, that gentle browsing
> easily becomes manic itchy finger grazing, and I recall that books are
> wonderful low tech devices (I love mine, even after my experiences in the
> used-book cartels). I recognise that with a massive surplus of global
> poetry production too many poems hang around in the web like dead
> bluebottles ("The Emperor said there were TOO MANY NOH PLAYS!" Ezra
> Pound,
> ABC of Reading). But the whole political economy and hierarchy of poetry
> starts to shift if everyone (everyone with sufficient energy & capital
> that
> is) can nail their hyperthesis to the virtual door of the canonical
> cathedra. "Poetry will be made by all..." said Lautreamont. Now, to
> quote
> my learned friend Doktor DNA Lawrence Russell, " we have more writers
> than
> readers..." Is the poem a commodity? Or is it a floating text, a
> director's cut or a reader's cut-up?
>
> One point that McLuhan made was that culture tends to use the rear-view
> mirror when dealing at first with technological change (e.g very early
> filmed narrative being shot like staged play from single viewpoint,
> Porter,
> Griffiths, Eisenstein learning the language of cinema through experiment,
> early BBC TV thinking of newscasts as radio with a few pictures).
>
> Now, after a decade of poetry on the WWW we're already seeing ( in the
> work of quite a few members of this list) not only extensions of
> collage/montage/cut-up ( all facilitated by the technology common to all
> text-editing and hypertext-reading platforms) but multi-media (audio &
> video), collective composition, extended intertextuality ( quite
> literally
> via hyperlink) de-centering of the authorial voice, alternative narrative
> pathways and what Lev Manovich
> (http://www.manovich.net/ ) has called a "data-base" aesthetic as opposed
> to
> a deployment of linear structures.
>
> Where this goes, I don't know yet. It could be that among a few writers
> there could be some kind of Wordsworthian reaction as in the classic
> early
> Ballard story where the poets of Vermilion Sands give up writing
> computerised pastiches on their clunky punched card machines to pursue the
> Muse. Also possible is a collapse/implosion of the world's industrial
> infrastructure as a result of global struggles over diminishing energy, in
> which case the web goes down and we get out our chewed pencils. But I'll
> wager - I'll buy Rupert a pint to put by his (virtual) notebook - that in
> a
> decade (Oct 9 2014) that the web and the e-book will have totally
> redefined the way we do poetry...
>
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