Internet 'is causing poetry boom'
Poetry, one of mankind's oldest art forms, is enjoying a resurgence due to the internet, according to the writers themselves.
By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:43PM GMT 28 Feb 2009
The grassroots scene is now growing, with live poetry readings becoming more popular and more poets getting their own pamphlets published Photo: JEFF GILBERT
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Rather than killing it off, modern technologies like email, social networking sites such as Facebook and online media players are helping poets reach new audiences.
The grassroots scene is now growing, with live poetry readings becoming more popular and more poets getting their own pamphlets published.
Competitions are also booming: the number of entries for the Foyle Young Poets Award more than doubling from 2003 to 2008 to almost 12,000.
Richard Price, a published poet who is also head of modern collections at the British Library, thought computers were actually helping poetry.
He said: "What's interesting is its counter-intuitive. You would have thought that poetry and pamphlets would be failing in the face of the internet, but that isn't happening."
He argued: "It's very like the relationship between the net and live music.
"It's perfectly possible to make music records fairly cheaply, put them up on the net and that's it.
"You would expect live music to disappear but it hasn't, the opposite has happened."
He went on: "At a basic level the net helps to build email lists, but more importantly you can build all kinds of social networks."
Poetry reading groups – known as "series" – are becoming stronger thanks to the growth of online communities to back them up, he said.
"These reading series often have Facebook groups around them. The net is helping smaller networks get together across the country so there's now more sense of solidarity between them."
And rather than making poetry pamphlets "obsolete", Mr Price said the internet had provided "a limitless shop window for a new generation of small presses and micro-publishers".
The number of pamphlets sent to the Poetry Book Society for publication rose from 37 to 90 between 2006 and 2008.
To mark the contribution that this ancient format continues to make, the British Library has just launched a new award with the Poetry Book Society for pamphlets called the Michael Marks Awards.
Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, thought poetry as an art form was simply well suited to the internet.
He said that because the web allowed people to listen to poetry once more, it had helped return it to the position it held in the "mead halls" 1,000 years ago.
"The last 1,000 years is not exactly an aberration, but a long loop," said Mr Motion, whose 10-year term expires on May 1.
"Poetry is as much to do with the noise the poem makes as about what the words mean when written on a page," he explained.
"It is crucially an oral form – it's character depends on it."
Websites like Poetry Archive, which enables people to listen to recordings of poets like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg reading their work, are now enjoying unprecedented success.
Poetry Archive , which Mr Motion helped set up, now receives 135,000 visitors a month and a million page hits.
Its "surprising" success had led him to conclude that the real problem with poetry was "not one of appetite, but of delivery".
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