Net Poetry: The beginnings
Since the end of the 1960s poetry has attracted a smaller and smaller niche following. However, there is hope that poetry may regain some of its audience. The rise of the Internet has allowed poetry to be produced and read in often entirely unconventional ways. The results of this marriage between technology and poetry vary from the downright strange to the often startlingly innovative.
It is a story that began in 1998, when Caterina Davinio, an Italian writer, bought together four hundred poets and published their work online. It was a bold experiment that united globally dispersed poets at the dawn of the digital age.
Caterinio Davinio 's first sites are still 'live' but their age is now showing. They have a crude, amateurish feel that was the hallmark of much early web design. Worse still, much of the writing is left un-translated in Italian, and the omnipresent, flashing colours make it almost impossible to navigate. In short, it is a bit of a mess.
Nevertheless, despite these considerable faults, the tone and concept of the site still arrests the viewer. Davinio describes her projects (with suitable avant-garde gusto) as 'collective creation, which runs in the net as communication, which brings people who live very far apart in contact'.
Later net poetry projects created by Davinio were exhibited at the Venice Biennale and would include the work of poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The inclusion of Ferlinghetti, the iconic poet of the beat generation, linked 'net poetry' to a lineage of avant-garde experimentation.
'Poetry happenings' led by the 'beat' generation spread across Europe and America during the 1960s. The events were characterised by extraordinary collaborations between poets and their audience. In this sense, early net poetry experiments seem like true descendants of these youthful, democratic poetic experiments. 'Net poetry' used the unique qualities of the Internet to foster dialogue between geographically scattered poets, presenting a comparable radical break with poetry's past.
The heroes of the beat 'happening' movement still live on as part of a wider, collective memory of the 1960s. Yet the movement's smaller stars, the figures that actually made the movement, have been largely scrubbed from history. The memory of their work is perhaps stored and archived on some grainy footage, kept for solely the historically curious.
Which begs the question; will the current alliance between poetry and the Internet suffer the same fate? Will it create a generation of poets whose writing and work will be forgotten in twenty years time? It seems unlikely. While 'poetry happenings' in the 1960s were tied to a particular cultural moment in history, developments of poetry online seem allied to more fundamental social changes in the way we create and receive the media.
This is demonstrated by just how diverse poetry's presence on the web has become. There are now sites explicitly devoted to archiving 'bad poetry'; equally, there are new international online poetry journals, whilst there is also an increasing number of 'digital poets'. The latter group of poets use computer programming to create some of the strangest poetry you will ever read.