Editorial: 6 November, 2002

January 18, 2006 In keeping with the spirit of the web, it is a truly international collaboration of twelve editors in twelve different countries – you will find them in the column to the right. Each of these countries maintains its own national domain within PIW, with its chosen "Poet of the Quarter", news and other articles.

PIW differs from other poetry sites on the internet firstly in its strong emphasis on poetry in translation as a way of stimulating the exchange of knowledge of poetry worldwide. Secondly, PIW is structured in a rather unusual way. In the context of nearly all our web pages, a selection of links is generated under the heading "Related Items", based on certain common characteristics of the pieces in question. Quite possibly these "Related Items" may at first sight appear entirely unrelated. Strange? Maybe. Inviting? We hope so. Visitors are encouraged to stroll, loiter, skip and meander more freely and intuitively from one page to the next, from one country to another - with a healthy disregard of borders and frames - than is possible on sites of a more conventional design, and, hopefully, encounter something interesting and unexpected along the way.

Ours is, one could say, a Whitmanesque approach to the internet: playfully loafing, expansive, and striving to contain multitudes. And with new countries and poets added to the site every quarter, PIW is set to expand exponentially. The Poetry International Foundation in Rotterdam, moreover, has provided a substantial amount of the poems online from its archive (see “other countries” to the right), as well as an interesting collection of video material, Camera Poetica. New material will also appear on this, the central, international domain of PIW.

Every week, the central domain chooses one poem from the work of the "Poets of the Quarter" as {id="1079" title="Poem of the Week"}. First of these is "Regret and Convince", by the little-known Chinese poet Sheng Xing, in our view a highly appropriate poem to start off with ({id="373" title="here"} you can find out why).

Apart from the 'Poem of the Week", what else can visitors expect of the central domain of PIW? International poetry news, of course, book reviews, coverage of important international events, like our {id="393" title="story"} on the Slovenian poetry festival of Vilenica. But also a monthly column by Dutch poet laureate Gerrit Komrij, regular {id="358" title="interviews"}, and essays by leading poets, critics and writers, such as our inaugural one by William Wadsworth on {id="376" title="Poetry on the Internet"}.

"Can good poetry be political?" was one of the questions that came up during a recent {id="394" title="round-table discussion"} between poets, editors and founding members of this website. It is a question that, in one form or another, kept surfacing in the first edition of PIW. As Shohdy Surur, son of the late Egyptian poet Naguib Surur found out, posting poetry on the internet is {id="331" title="not necessarily a risk-free activity"}. He was sentenced to a year in prison for publishing some of his father’s controversial poems; a court of appeal recently upheld the verdict.
Political repression has also been an important factor in the work of Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare, who in this month’s {id="358" title="interview"} talks about living and writing under the dictatorship of general Abacha. Finally, PIW received {id="260" title="an urgent plea"} for solidarity with Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, who is trying to ascertain the fate of his daughter-in-law, who disappeared in Uruguay in the 1970s. Two years ago Gelman was reunited with his missing granddaughter after a similar international campaign of poets and writers was mounted.

For those of you who at this point are still wondering why the world needs another poetry website, why, indeed, anyone would want to waste their time on poetry at all, there is the Defence of Poetry Series, in which six of the world’s most eminent poets argue why, in fact, poetry is indispensible. "There is no more reliable reporter of what it means to be stuck in this eternal can of worms," as Charles Simic, inaugural poet in the series, puts it. "Even if you were to find yourself living in the crummiest country in the world in an age of unparallelled vileness and stupidity, poetry would get written and its beauty and eloquence would give you hope."

Finally, most importantly, please go read the poems. They are the reason for this site, and sufficient reason, we feel. Have a look at Colombian surrealist Raúl Henao. Read Cavafy, Seferis and Dimoula in Greece. Surf from Germany to Australia, from Croatia to France, from Morocco to The Netherlands to Zimbabwe and back again to Germany. Get sidetracked. We hope that you’ll accept our invitation au voyage, have a long and enjoyable journey, and will bring some new acquaintances home with you.