Hi
The internet does allow poetry to be distributed fairly easily and Great
Works is, as Paul Green pointed out, a good example. This doesn't mean Peter
Philpott doesn't work hard at it, but it probably isn't much more work than
producing a paper magazine and it can, in theory, be read by anyone on the
list, and all issues are permananently available.
I'm trying to get at what is different about the internet as a way of
distributing poetry or rather what difference it might make to poetry. As I
said in an earlier mail just about all of its functions could be carried out
by previous technologies but I'm still wondering whether speed of
distribution and volume of potential readership does make a difference. Some
of the figures quoted by Dylan and Douglas are pretty impressive and as
someone who helps to produce a magazine with a distribution of a couple of
hundred (Skald) and those mostly to local people, I know we'd never get near
those numbers.
I was thinking about whether the internet made poetry more 'international',
not just in the sense that it can be read in different countries but whether
its place of origin was less important. So rather than such and such a poet
or publication being English, or Welsh or Australian for example those
distinctions become unimportant. The internet has no 'sense of place' but
exists everywhere and nowhere. This kind of ties in with earlier
experimental poetry which sought to be specifically international, and would
often implicitly critique an essentialist idea of a sense of place and
identification with that place, although there is an irony in that most of
those poets would be anti globalisation. Yet the internet is both a cause
and effect of processes of globalisation.
So the question I seem to be asking is whether the internet continues and
develops an exeprimentalist project of critiquing place and regional or
national identity through its processes of distribution or whether it is
simply another medium for distributing poetry.
Ian
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