FRANK WILSON is a staff writer for the INQUIRER .
Contact books editor Frank Wilson at fwilson@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/frankwilson.
PS : to sponsor poetry
visit Poetry Sponsors
 |
FRANK WILSON
Online Poetry: A Thriving Community
Some is quite good, but is it literature?
Everybody agrees that the Internet's impact on politics and the media
has been considerable. Ask Dan Rather. Or Trent Lott.
But what about its impact on literature - in particular, on poetry?
Poetry?
Yes, poetry. It seems that the crème de la crème of verbal construction, what the philosopher
Martin Heidegger, in a rare lapse from impenetrability, called the essential form of speech,
has taken to cyberspace the way dandelion seeds take to a gust of wind.
I didn't pay any attention to this until last fall, when I agreed to judge the Interboard Poetry
Community's online poetry competition for October. Managing editor Gina Bryson e-mailed
me about three dozen poems culled from God-knows-how-many submissions
.
Choosing three winners turned out to be harder than I anticipated, because just about all of
the poems had obvious merit. This wasn't doggerel, or prose arbitrarily divided into lines.
There was real word-music on display, fresh imagery, and genuine sentiment. I ended up
reading through the whole batch several times and going with the three that more than any
others stuck in my head.
Something else stuck in my head: the notion that poetry online might be worth looking into.
In my head is where the notion stayed until last month, when I posted something on my blog
(http://booksinq.blogspot.com/) about it and invited interested parties to weigh in.
Did they ever. More than 75 comments, many of them fairly long and detailed, complete with
links, came my way. A healthy batch of e-mail arrived as well.
What did I learn? More than I can ever possibly recount here.
Take the numbers. The other day I asked on my blog if anybody knew of any online poetry
numbers worth citing. Beau Blue, whose Web page Beau Blue Presents features Blue's
Cruzio Café - where, currently, animated versions of poets Robert Sward, Rob Evans, Jack
Foley and Renay read their poems - responded quickly. "According to search, after search,
after search," Blue wrote, "there seems to be zero number of people who actually know
how many poetry Web sites exist." Carl Bryant, whose blog is modestly named Carl's Tiny Brain,
was more helpful. "Technorati claims that there are around 4,000 blog posts per day
tagged as 'poetry,' " Byant wrote. "Google returns 397,000 results for the
'online+poetry' search phrase."
Bryant elaborated in a follow-up: "Amateur poetry is everywhere on the Internet... circulated
via e-mail, posted in private and public group discussion forums, shared on thousands of Web
logs, published in many small e-zines... . Exact numbers are difficult to estimate, because it
isn't an organized activity. It's a grassroots culture of personal artistic expression... . Some
of it is quite good. Is it literature? Not according to academic definitions."
That term 'academic' seems key to understanding the phenomenon of Internet poetry.
I think what is meant by it is the poetry establishment - the poetic counterpart to the
mainstream media (MSM). As Bryant wrote in a comment to an earlier post of mine:
"Print poetry tends to be an in-crowd sort of thing. The Internet has blown this wide open.
The in-crowd is much larger... . it includes everyone. It's instant, supportive, and appreciative.
There are niches where aspiring poets of any level can fit right in. Poetry e-zines exist for
practically any taste and level of sophistication." Rachel Dacus, proprietor of the blog
Rocket Kids, agreed. Online poetry, she wrote, is "a participant sport."
In other words, as with the blogosphere vs. the MSM, online poetry has something to do
with getting around official gatekeepers. But not everything. Far more important seems to
be that sense of community, and the opportunity to share one's work and have it judged -
and critiqued - by other poets. Lisa Janice Cohen, of Blue Muse Poetry, moderates an
online poetry community and is an active member of Forward Motion for Writers,
an Internet writing community. She wrote that "the promise and the strength of the Internet
has nothing to do with commerce, and everything to do with linking communities of common
interests. Through Wild Poetry Forumand Forward Motion, I have access to a group of
writers from all over the world who come together simply because they all have reverence
for the power of the written word."
Others, however, say that all is not always sweetness and light in the world of Internet poetry.
Arthur Durkee, of ArthurDurkee.net , who works in a range of media, reported that he has
taken part in "boards where things ran very smoothly, a lot of great writing appeared, and
critique was honest without being vicious, precise... without being a personal attack." But,
he added, "the anonymity of the Internet frequently leads certain people to cut their dark sides
loose, and... say and do things they'd never do in face-to-face life."
There was also mention of "Sturgeon's Law," named after science fiction writer Theodore
Sturgeon, who once said that "90 percent of science fiction is crud. That's because 90
percent of everything is crud." Rick Storey, a research scientist whose poetry has been
anthologized in Australia and Britain, wrote that "the very democracy of the Net means that
there is little or no segregation between contributors of widely different abilities."
Durkee observed that "if a board grows into a community of friends, who have some
familiarity with each other's work and concerns and topics, the critique tends to get
better" - in other words, a board analogous to a "face-to-face regular group." He added
that "the only poetry boards online that I have found useful at all are those that follow
that real-space model."
But Gary Blankenship, publisher of MindFire (), disagreed. "Forums or workshops," he wrote,
"are not meant to be publishing. By and large they are less polished by nature. E-magazines
are something else again and they do publish works that match and exceed anything on
paper... . there are between 25 and 50 that are as good as the Iowa Review, Threepenny
[Review], [the Best American Poetry series,] [the Pushcart Prize series,] or any other..."
Can any valid inferences be drawn from all this? I think so. The most obvious is that there
is a lot of online poetry being written, and that its quality is widely variable, as is the quality
of the criticism.
But it would also seem that the more people you have writing poetry the better the chances
are that more good poetry will be written, simply by virtue of a broader take on reality born
of a greater variety of experience. It is worth noting that much of the poetry online boasts
highly innovative kinds of presentation - Cruzio Cafe's aforementioned animations, for
instance. It also gives scope to genres that are frequently overlooked, such as the
"speculative poetry" featured at the Science Fiction Poetry Association.
At any rate, as Durkee observed, "making a poem out of an experience is an
inherently positive enterprise, regardless of the quality of the final result." Or,
as a woman from Mississippi who identified herself only as Steadydrip, put it:
"Using the Internet, society finds a voice when society feels like it has no voice... .
I might not be educated, astute, degreed or academic but I am. And, in simply
being, I have entrance into the warp and woof of the universe..."
Note: Starting today [9June06], my blog will offer
a clearinghouse of poetry Web sites. I'll be maintaining that page and invite
your suggestions and queries.
Copyright 2006, republished here with consent of the author |
 |
|
|
|
