Article
An antidote to the marketplace
Poetry on the internet
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January 18, 2006
- Eliot Weinberger
Weinberger’s observation on the fertility of the Web as a disseminator of poetry echoes a definition proffered by the poet he has most famously translated, Octavio Paz, who called poetry an “antidote to the marketplace” in his essay The Other Voice. When in June 2000 I first spoke on “Poetry and the Internet” in a seminar sponsored by Poetry International, the tide of public and private-sector enthusiasm for the Internet was at its height. More and more, to the dismay of many of its pioneers, the Web was being seen primarily as an engine of commerce. Nevertheless, one of the surprising statistics I offered at the time was that out of a total of approximately 8 million sites on the Web, only 600,000 were e-commerce sites, while 230,000 – more than a third as many – were poetry sites. I haven’t been able to update this statistic for this occasion, but it would be a safe guess to say, in light of the popping of so many e-commerce bubbles over the past two years, that the ratio since has if anything tilted further in favor of poetry.
A more specific measure of the place of poetry on the Web might be poets.org, the website of The Academy of American Poets, which I oversaw the creation and development of from its inception in 1995 through 2001. The site contains a poets’ archive, including poems, a brief biography and bibliography, usually a photograph and when possible an audio recording for each poet. There are also poetry exhibits organized around themes, like love or grief, or literary history, e.g. “The Harlem Renaissance” or “The Modernist Revolution”. There are also discussion forums and forums where anyone can post their own work, as well as extensive links to other poetry sites of all kinds. The focus of the site is on modern American poetry; the primary constituency it is designed to serve, besides the general public, is secondary school students and teachers. The reason for this is that the Academy’s own research has shown not only that poetry on the Internet is, not surprisingly, most popular among a younger audience, but that most adult readers of poetry cultivated their enthusiasm during there teenage years, most frequently at the instigation of an inspiring teacher (or, as Robert Creeley once suggested, in defiance of a boring one). In 2000, to better serve this key constituency, the Academy launched a separate program, the Online Poetry Classroom, with its own website, designed especially around the needs of secondary school teachers and their students.
By 2000, poets.org had archived 220 poets, and was logging 4 million page hits a month and 80,000 unique visits. At present the site includes nearly 500 poets, and logs 28 million page hits a month and nearly 400,000 unique visits. This is clearly an extraordinary rate of growth, and an extraordinarily large audience for a “specialized interest.”
A survey of other popular poetry sites indicates steady growth in traffic as well. One of the most successful, Poetry Daily receives fewer page hits than the Academy site – 7.3 million a month – but more unique visits: 444,000. One of the best archival sites, the Electronic Poetry Center at the University of Buffalo boasts 10 million “transactions” a year, and traffic from more than 90 different countries. All in all, a Google search on “poetry” yields over 8 million listings, about the same number as “jazz” and “soccer,” more than “United States,” and more than twice as many as “Christianity.”
Antidote to the marketplace: nowhere is this more evident than in the universe of literary magazines, where the financial challenges of advertising, distribution, and printing costs make the chances of survival precarious at best. While circulation in the vicinity of 10,000 copies – as is the case for instance with The Paris Review – signifies a rare and enviable degree of success, and fewer than 5,000 is considered healthy, the superb poetry webzine Jacket, edited by John Tranter out of Australia, claims nearly 300,000 readers worldwide. Moreover, the cost of maintaining the magazine is a fraction of that of a print counterpart, it is available to the public for free, and copies never go out of print.
Which brings us to the importance of Poetry International Web. Of all the endangered poetic species, at least from the perspective of the United States, poetry in translation is closest to extinction. Nowhere have the bottom-line demands of the publishing marketplace exacted a greater toll, to the extent that shockingly few books of poetry in translation are published at all anymore. An average of fewer than 250 literary works in translation were published in the U.S. in 1999-2000, and of these fewer than fifty were poetry. And of these, only a handful (thirteen) were by living poets, all but one published by small presses. In short, poetry – indeed literature – in the United States, where modernism had always implied internationalism, is rapidly becoming an isolationist practice. In all likelihood, only the Internet can reverse this encroaching famine in international poetic discourse and the cultural insularity it is bound to foster.
Recent studies have shown the increasing importance, in a “mature” Internet environment, of creating central sites for any given niche. While decentralization and the democratization of media are signature virtues of the Web, the existence of portal sites through which an audience can easily access an entire matrix of ramifying sites vastly increases the visibility of the given subject within the medium. This is precisely what Poetry International Web can accomplish, as a central clearing house and global facilitator for poetry in translation on the Web.
As a new generation of American readers, writers, and scholars of literature pursues its education largely online, there may be renewed hope that the literatures of other languages and traditions will exert a primary influence in shaping their sensibilities and their cultural idiom. What Paz called “the other voice”, the essential voice at the heart of every poem, must in some sense always represent the voice of the Other: we can only be grateful to find an enormous chorus of such voices being broadcast to the twenty-first century by Poetry International. Multilingual keyboard image via Shutterstock
In this short essay written especially for the launch of Poetry International Web in 2002, poet and former executive director of The Academy of American Poets William Wadsworth asserts that in the United States, poetry is rapidly becoming an isolationist practice. “Only the Internet can reverse this encroaching famine in international poetic discourse and the cultural insularity it is bound to foster.”
While the Web will take a long time replacing the existing forms of mass media, it is already the primary medium for people with specialized interests. It is where the sufferer from a rare disease or the Pola Negri fan in Kansas finds a kindred spirit in Bolivia. Good literature (as James Laughlin used to call it) will forever be a specialized interest, and it will be forever useless to decry the popularity or proliferation of lesser vehicles. With the Web the surprising news may well be that there are more fellow enthusiasts scattered around the planet than we think.- Eliot Weinberger
Weinberger’s observation on the fertility of the Web as a disseminator of poetry echoes a definition proffered by the poet he has most famously translated, Octavio Paz, who called poetry an “antidote to the marketplace” in his essay The Other Voice. When in June 2000 I first spoke on “Poetry and the Internet” in a seminar sponsored by Poetry International, the tide of public and private-sector enthusiasm for the Internet was at its height. More and more, to the dismay of many of its pioneers, the Web was being seen primarily as an engine of commerce. Nevertheless, one of the surprising statistics I offered at the time was that out of a total of approximately 8 million sites on the Web, only 600,000 were e-commerce sites, while 230,000 – more than a third as many – were poetry sites. I haven’t been able to update this statistic for this occasion, but it would be a safe guess to say, in light of the popping of so many e-commerce bubbles over the past two years, that the ratio since has if anything tilted further in favor of poetry.
A more specific measure of the place of poetry on the Web might be poets.org, the website of The Academy of American Poets, which I oversaw the creation and development of from its inception in 1995 through 2001. The site contains a poets’ archive, including poems, a brief biography and bibliography, usually a photograph and when possible an audio recording for each poet. There are also poetry exhibits organized around themes, like love or grief, or literary history, e.g. “The Harlem Renaissance” or “The Modernist Revolution”. There are also discussion forums and forums where anyone can post their own work, as well as extensive links to other poetry sites of all kinds. The focus of the site is on modern American poetry; the primary constituency it is designed to serve, besides the general public, is secondary school students and teachers. The reason for this is that the Academy’s own research has shown not only that poetry on the Internet is, not surprisingly, most popular among a younger audience, but that most adult readers of poetry cultivated their enthusiasm during there teenage years, most frequently at the instigation of an inspiring teacher (or, as Robert Creeley once suggested, in defiance of a boring one). In 2000, to better serve this key constituency, the Academy launched a separate program, the Online Poetry Classroom, with its own website, designed especially around the needs of secondary school teachers and their students.
By 2000, poets.org had archived 220 poets, and was logging 4 million page hits a month and 80,000 unique visits. At present the site includes nearly 500 poets, and logs 28 million page hits a month and nearly 400,000 unique visits. This is clearly an extraordinary rate of growth, and an extraordinarily large audience for a “specialized interest.”
A survey of other popular poetry sites indicates steady growth in traffic as well. One of the most successful, Poetry Daily receives fewer page hits than the Academy site – 7.3 million a month – but more unique visits: 444,000. One of the best archival sites, the Electronic Poetry Center at the University of Buffalo boasts 10 million “transactions” a year, and traffic from more than 90 different countries. All in all, a Google search on “poetry” yields over 8 million listings, about the same number as “jazz” and “soccer,” more than “United States,” and more than twice as many as “Christianity.”
Antidote to the marketplace: nowhere is this more evident than in the universe of literary magazines, where the financial challenges of advertising, distribution, and printing costs make the chances of survival precarious at best. While circulation in the vicinity of 10,000 copies – as is the case for instance with The Paris Review – signifies a rare and enviable degree of success, and fewer than 5,000 is considered healthy, the superb poetry webzine Jacket, edited by John Tranter out of Australia, claims nearly 300,000 readers worldwide. Moreover, the cost of maintaining the magazine is a fraction of that of a print counterpart, it is available to the public for free, and copies never go out of print.
Which brings us to the importance of Poetry International Web. Of all the endangered poetic species, at least from the perspective of the United States, poetry in translation is closest to extinction. Nowhere have the bottom-line demands of the publishing marketplace exacted a greater toll, to the extent that shockingly few books of poetry in translation are published at all anymore. An average of fewer than 250 literary works in translation were published in the U.S. in 1999-2000, and of these fewer than fifty were poetry. And of these, only a handful (thirteen) were by living poets, all but one published by small presses. In short, poetry – indeed literature – in the United States, where modernism had always implied internationalism, is rapidly becoming an isolationist practice. In all likelihood, only the Internet can reverse this encroaching famine in international poetic discourse and the cultural insularity it is bound to foster.
Recent studies have shown the increasing importance, in a “mature” Internet environment, of creating central sites for any given niche. While decentralization and the democratization of media are signature virtues of the Web, the existence of portal sites through which an audience can easily access an entire matrix of ramifying sites vastly increases the visibility of the given subject within the medium. This is precisely what Poetry International Web can accomplish, as a central clearing house and global facilitator for poetry in translation on the Web.
As a new generation of American readers, writers, and scholars of literature pursues its education largely online, there may be renewed hope that the literatures of other languages and traditions will exert a primary influence in shaping their sensibilities and their cultural idiom. What Paz called “the other voice”, the essential voice at the heart of every poem, must in some sense always represent the voice of the Other: we can only be grateful to find an enormous chorus of such voices being broadcast to the twenty-first century by Poetry International. Multilingual keyboard image via Shutterstock
© William Wadsworth
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