Ian, if you look at my defunct magazine Lynx you will see that contributions
could come from anywhere. That is what the Internet has been about since its
beginning. When I was closely involved with the poetry scene everybody knew
everybody else in the webzine area. But that is some years ago and I am not
familiar with the current situation. Maybe I should check out my old haunts
and see if things have changed. But in those days British webzine was
minimal.
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "ian davidson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 7:08 PM
Subject: Poetry and the Internet
> 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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