Mark McGuinness investigates what the internet has to offer practising poets

Poetry is ideal for the internet, even if the internet isn’t completely ideal for poetry. On the plus side, it’s easy to reproduce poems in digital form, they don’t take up much bandwidth or storage space, and there is a huge back-catalogue of poems in the public domain, which can be freely published and downloaded without the threat of prosecution for copyright infringement. And anyone concerned about the minority-interest status of poetry may be pleasantly surprised to find large numbers of fellow enthusiasts in cyberspace. On the minus side, most poetry readers would probably agree that there’s nothing like having a real book or magazine in your hand; while the Net has its uses, replacing my poetry library is not going to be one of them.

So what can the Net offer the practising poet? On the principle that you can’t write good poetry without reading lots of it, one of the main attractions has to be the wealth of classic and contemporary poetry available via online archives and shops. One of the best archives is the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online, a huge searchable database of poetry from Caedmon onwards – although copyright restrictions mean that there is very little modern poetry. You can browse the collection by poet or poem, scroll through the massive timeline or search for individual words or phrases. A nice feature is the calendar of significant dates in poetry – I already knew Wordsworth wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’ on my birthday but I was pleased to discover that I share the date with John Clare and Wole Soyinka. Other features include hyperlinked notes, short biographies, critical essays, a bibliography and a glossary of poetic terms. The whole thing is a monument to the labours of the Toronto English Department and an invaluable resource for poets and students.

For anyone frustrated with the limited poetry stock in their local bookshop, the Poetry Bookshop Online is a godsend. Run by the Poetry Book Society, it offers all the poetry books currently in print in the UK. Having wanted to read Mark Doty’s often-praised-but-rarely-stocked My Alexandria for some time, I was delighted to find it here – with a much quicker delivery time and lower postage charge than Amazon. The major poetry publishers’ sites are mostly online catalogues, which can be useful if you’re trying to track down a particular book (turns out I could have got My Alexandria from the Random House site) but there isn’t much inspiration on offer. Bloodaxe is an exception, offering suggestions for beginners and aspiring poets on its ‘New to Poetry?’ and ‘Submissions’ pages. For small press publications, try the excellent range on offer at Inpress Books.

For magazines, the Poetry Library’s Poetry Magazine Archive is an excellent place to sample back issues of nearly 30 poetry magazines (including Magma). There are contact details for each magazine so that you can get the latest editions of the ones you like. The Poetry Library’s main site also includes a <a href="http://Poetry Queries service where you can avail yourself of the librarians’ knowledge, and an online version of the library’s ‘Lost Quotations’ board where readers help each other identify half-remembered poems.

Not everyone agrees with me that printed magazines are preferable to virtual ones, and when I look at the quality of some web journals I am tempted to change my mind. Contemporary Poetry Review is on a self-proclaimed mission to “resuscitate poetry criticism”, covering modern poetry with in-depth reviews, features and interviews. Its editorial policy is “to encourage criticism that is clear, spacious, and free of academic jargon and politics” and the articles I sampled bore this out. The stylish design extends to the layout of articles, making them surprisingly easy to read online, and the virtual format means there is plenty of space for reviewers to expand their arguments.

Jacket is another magazine that makes a virtue of the web format, with each issue much larger than the average print magazine. In an interview with Time magazine, editor John Tranter says that although he is based in Australia, Jacket “comes from the Internet. It’s almost an outer-space thing”. The look and feel of the site bear witness to his careful consideration of the pros and cons of virtual publishing, and his editorial notes on “Why paragraphs should be much shorter on the Internet” should be required reading for anyone publishing anything on the Net. The current issue (No.26) contains an extended feature on Tom Raworth and translation of Frank O’Hara into Norwegian, complete with photos and sound files. And the whole thing (including back issues) is completely free! More e-magazines are listed on the Poetry Library site.

Poetry is arguably a multimedia experience, and the internet has the potential to house an audio (and even video) archive of poets and poetry to match what currently exists for texts. So hats off to the Academy of American Poets for their stunning collection of readings – a quick browse found recordings by Bishop, Hacker, Muldoon, Milosz, Stevens and Pound, plus many more of similar stature. Each recording is accompanied by the text of the poem, making this a must-see (and must-hear) site.

About.com has a good directory of poetry audio collections, from which honourable mention should go to the BBC Arts and Books site which has some wonderful recordings, of readings by Tennyson, Plath, Heaney and Armitage, and interviews with Yeats, de la Mare, Cummings, Auden and Walcott among others. Looking at individual poets’ websites, I was surprised to see how few of them feature audio files, as this would seem to be an ideal way for poets to present another dimension of their work.

So the Net offers plenty of ways to help poets absorb poetry through the eyes and ears, supplementing the dusty tomes that line their garrets. But how can it help them with the actual business of writing? For courses, the obvious places to look in the UK are The Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School. While neither of these offer online tuition, the sites have plenty of information about their courses, and it’s worth keeping an eye on the websites as classes book up quickly. Since last October the Guardian has been running a monthly poetry workshop on its website, in which lucky readers have had their poems critiqued by poets including Ruth Fainlight and Anne Stevenson – it could be your turn next.

For a more democratic, free-for-all experience, type “poetry workshop” into Google and sift through the 2.6 million results. If that’s a little daunting, The Poetry Kit has condensed the selection down to a dozen or so recommendations. The usual format is for visitors to post their poems on a messageboard for others to comment. The feedback can range from the bland to the downright insulting, but I also came across some genuinely constructive criticism. I can imagine that a well-moderated workshop of this kind could be very helpful, especially for poets without a good class or workshop in their local area. In several workshops I was surprised to see poems marked with scores out of five, voted for by readers, but I suppose it’s a robust way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff – provided you trust your fellow readers’ judgement.

As well as offering workshops and courses, the Net performs a vital function in connecting poetry readers and writers. The Poetry Kit site has a well-earned reputation as a portal for the best poetry on the web, with directories of websites on just about every topic of interest to poets, as well as its own magazine. The Poetry Society site features a multitude of poetry events and initiatives including a Poetry Class with online resources for teachers. If you live in London, check out the programme of events at the Poetry Café. There is also a beautiful map of Poetry Landmarks of Britain, which you can click on to find out about poetry activity in your area, as well as landmarks such as Hardy’s gravestone and Adlestrop railway station. (Apparently the station has vanished, although the sign is preserved in a bus shelter – there’s got to be a poem in that…) If your local landmark isn’t featured, you can nominate it for inclusion.

Finally, what does Magma bring to the online party? The Magma website has recently been redesigned and carries a ‘taster’ of the poetry and prose contents of each issue of the magazine. We have linked up with the Inpress Books website to make it easy for readers to buy Magma online. And we have now launched the Magma discussion forums to give poetry enthusiasts a platform for intelligent and lively debate about poetry in general and Magma in particular. Join us in the Debating Room to discuss any aspect of poetry and feel free to use the Noticeboard to post announcements of your reading, course, or other poetry event. In keeping with our editorial policy of celebrating ‘difference’, Magma is sometimes the scene of vigorous debate (see for example David Boll’s riposte in this issue to Laurie Smith’s review of David Constantine in Magma 31). You can now have your say on these debates via the Respond to the Editor forum, which is specifically for discussion of the contents of Magma. So if I’ve missed out your favourite poetry website then Respond to the Editor is the place to tell me – and others – about it!

For another survey of poetry on the Net, check out Tim Kindberg’s Poetry Wired article from Magma 19.