"Without searching for any phoney universalism, it must be recognized that
there is an international dimension to the art of poetry in the modern
world."
Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, Modern African Poetry, 1988

That has tended to operate at a stratospheric level, mind you, at least
prior to the Net, though things like mail art have been around for a long
time. Now there are various forms of internationalism. The stratospheric
Penguins and whatnot, the international lists like these, enterprises like
DOC(K)S from France, Web publications such as http://turbulence.org (which
is not solely or even primarily literary but does publish literary net.art
and commissions international work); and various other small press and other
or mixed-media enterprises that aspire to an international level and have
some concern, however specialized, with poetry.

Poetry functions quite nicely locally as well. You can create a venue and
get appreciative audiences and the venue can be an important part of the
local culture and find its level also in larger circles be they geographic
or stylistic, as the population etc allows.

Poetry also operates functionally and also sometimes dysfunctionally at a
regional and national level.

Just as the locus of relevance of a particular poem may be either local or
regional or national or international or some combination thereof, so too
can the media in which it's composed be other than print-based or perhaps
involve different versions for different media or whatever.

One of the results of these multiplications of context (both geographic and
media contexts) is the arising of new approaches to poetry.

Work that finds its locus of relevance at an international level may be
'more universal' but less intensely relevant locally or regionally or
nationally. More generally, what makes a poem interesting and worthwhile in
one locus may be different from another locus. Recently, Ron Silliman wrote
about "the Blake test". His "Blake test" is whether a poem is "platform
independent" (a good thing, he says). So, for instance, Blake passes the
Blake test because the poems stand well on their own as printed poems, do
not require the visual work that Blake did for them. But the "Blake test" is
not valid in poetical work in which the media are interdependent, and there
are sometimes very good reasons to make media interdependent. Also, poetry
for print is not altogether "platform dependent" in that it often suffers
outside of print. The "Blake test" privileges print poetry.

So we end up with not only different approaches to poetry via the
multiplication of geographic and media loci, but inconsistent erm standards
of literary judgement which may nonetheless be appropriate within their
particular loci.

Not that this is a problem. Just that poetry is multiple.

Still, as we move among loci, the separation from other loci can be painful,
somewhat alienating.

ja
http://vispo.com