e-poets Plain Text: Poetry across frontiers (04)

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Poetry across frontiers (04)

response from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Hi Kojo!

E-poets is great concerning spoken word, and also in taking spoken word wider than the usually local focus it has. I have mentioned e-poets to some writers here in Victoria concentrating on spoken word, but they're not wired enough yet to get it and probably not sufficiently ambitious to take it past the local stage, which seems important to deepening the art. Isou says 'Each poet will integrate everything into everything'.

There are other lists and sites that concentrate on other dimensions of poetry. http://www.webartery.com is one of the homes for a bunch of artists/writers/musicians/critics pursuing web.art. It's great to be able to publish as you see fit on the Web, and to an international audience, and in as many media as you like. The artists at that site (the members' sites page is good) usually develop their own sites and create work specifically for the Web. There's also an email list associated with the site that concentrates on discussion of poetics of web.art. I started the list and the site and moderate the list with the Australian writer Mez.

There are many poetry sites on the net, and they fall into various categories (or evade them). Concerning spoken word, three come to mind immediately--though there are many more, depending on what you want. Kurt's site, which I'm sure you know, is www.e-poets.net and Margery Snyder and Bob Holman 's site is at http://poetry.miningco.com/arts/poetry/mbody.htm. I think both Margery and Bob are on this list.

Vancouver, not far from where I live, has the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre at http://www.edgewisecafe.org run by Heather Haley, who also is on this list. That site has the best archive of spoken work by Vancouver poets I know of. Peter Howard of England has a good links page at http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/poemlink.htm

Others on the list will know much more than I do, though, about the spoken word scene on the net. It's quite large. I am starting to get back into it a bit, having returned to Victoria, but I've been concentrating on the page and the screen and the recording...the inscription, one way or another, for about ten years, though I did a literary radio show for a long time before that.

My site is http://www.vispo.com. There's work in several media: poem poems, stories, visual poems, audio, interactive music (shockwave) and interactive poems (dhtml and java), essays on new media, guest work, and other stuff, plus a great links page to web.art around the world.

Just follow your interests and the links wherever you visit, Kojo, and you will soon know the nooks and crannies of the net relevant to your own pursuit of poetry. But lists like this are great for broadening things also. A regular part of the webartery list is the posting of urls to work on the web, mostly web.art related links.

If I can be of assistance in that, don't hesitate to ask. That's one way of working together across the large distances of the world, and I like it very much.

Regards,
Jim Andrews

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