07/30/2000

By Tom Mayo

POETRY

Here are a couple of cultural benchmarks to consider:

1. The average print run for a book of poetry is 1,000 copies, and most titles are out of print the same year they are published.

2. Poetry sites on the World Wide Web are, by one estimate, the sixth most frequently visited of all Web sites, well ahead of David Letterman's Top Ten List and 'N Sync's home page.

What, you might well ask, is going on?

For starters, poetry on the Web is free (that is, after you have paid for the Internet connection and the computer hardware). There is no financial barrier to entry, no initial investment and no chance for buyer's remorse. You click on a poem: If you like it, great! Click! On to another! If not, no big deal: You're not out any cash and click! On to another!

This hit-and-run approach to reading poetry is a little sad. One of poetry's great pleasures comes from working over a poem that does not at first reveal itself to you or that you frankly don't particularly like. And consumer that I am, I am probably more likely to give a little more time and attention to a poem I have paid for. But perhaps Web poetry-surfers make no such distinction. And perhaps they print out poems and read them like any others.

A dizzying number of options on the Web

Another explanation may be that the much-ballyhooed poetry boom is fueled by younger readers who are more Web-savvy than their elders and, therefore, more likely to turn their computer's browser toward a poetry site.

If so, what are they finding? Anthologies, mostly: a great Shakespeare site from MIT (the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/), a fantastic amount of pre-20th century American and British poetry at Columbia's Bartleby site (www.bartleby.com/index.html) and Robert Pinsky's "Favorite Poem Project" (www.favoritepoem.org/), to name only a few.

There are also hundreds of fans' sites listed on Yahoo's poets' page (dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/Literature/Authors/Poets/), a dozen or so online poetry magazines (many are collected on my poetry page: http://www.smu.edu/~tmayo/twmlinkspoetry.htm) and more than a few sites with extensive audio files of poetry (the Academy of American Poets' "Listening Booth" is wonderful: www.poets.org/booth/booth.cfm; Atlantic Monthly's site is particularly strong: www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/; and the online version of Bill Moyers' PBS special Fooling With Words deserves many return visits: www.pbs.org/wnet/foolingwithwords/. One of the quirkiest is the site devoted to Raymond Queneau's algorithm for randomly generating 100 trillion sonnets: www.spacelab.net/~smulloni/java/queneau.html. The Web is also a place where poets can participate in online workshops and conferences. Many are listed at poetry.about.com/arts/poetry/msubwork.htm. Also, poets can use the Web to self-publish at a very low cost to a very large audience. Local poet Hillol Ray has learned this lesson well (www.boloji.com/writers/hr.htm), as have others: poetry.about.com/arts/poetry/msubmenupoets.htm.

A good place to go for daily poetry hits

Amid all of this, one site stands out, unique in ways as close to indispensable as a poetry site can be: "Poetry Daily" (www.poems.com). Every day, co-editors Don Selby and Diane Boller feature a new poem from a recent book or current journal. I have been a fan since they first highlighted Billy Collins' poems (even before his legend-making appearances on A Prairie Home Companion).

The dailies are archived for a year, and the archive constitutes a constantly changing showcase of the liveliest and richest modern poetry. Based upon a quick perusal of the current archive, Mr. Selby and Ms. Boller have found much to admire in the recent poetry of old-timers Daniel Halpern and M.S. Merwin, the underappreciated Lawrence Raab and relative newcomers Dean Young and A.E. Stallings. "Poetry Daily" offers an impressive collection of new poetry and is a great way to stay plugged in to who is publishing what and where. In addition, the news page on "Poetry Daily" collects reviews and criticism from the online versions of newspapers and journals around the world and news from the commercial side of the poetry biz.

Launched in April 1997, "Poetry Daily" is now viewed by nearly 150,000 visitors per month, a more than 80 percent increase over last year's number. During peak viewing times, as many as 12,000 visitors will hit the site in a single day, and more than 16,000 poetry fans subscribe to the weekly e-mail newsletter. Not bad for a nonprofit site that started as a part-time sideline for Mr. Selby, Ms. Boller and their collaborators. For daily visitors as far away as Hong Kong and New Zealand, "Poetry Daily" amply fulfills its goal to be "a vital meeting place for poetry publishers, editors, poets, and readers."

Tom Mayo, poetry-lover and associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.