Problem with Poetry: Not appetite but delivery

Is technology helping or hurting poetry? An article in the UK’s Telegraph reports that,

Rather then killing it off, modern technologies like email, social networking sites such as Facebook and online media players are helping poets reach new audiences. The grassroots scene is now growing, with live poetry readings becoming more popular and more poets getting their own pamphlets published. Competitions are also booming: the number of entries for the Foyle Young Poets Award more than doubling from 2003 to 2008 to almost 12,000.

That’s right–access to an audience is HELPing poets and poetry grow and thrive! For example, here are two thriving sites where poets post and participate in on-line poetry communities: Monday Poetry Train and Read Write Poem. Richard Smith,  published poet and head of modern collections at the British Library, argues “It’s very like the relationship between the net and live music. It’s perfectly possible to make music records fairly cheaply, put them up on the net and that’s it. You would expect live music to disappear but it hasn’t, the opposite has happened.”

Mr Richards continues the internet provides “a limitless shop window for a new generation of small presses and micro-publishers”.

Andrew Motion, the British Poet Laureate, finds poetry well suited to the internet;  the web allows people to listen to poetry once more, returning it to the position it held in the “mead halls” 1,000 years ago. “Poetry is as much to do with the noise the poem makes as about what the words mean when written on a page,” he explains. “It is crucially an oral form – it’s character depends on it.”

Websites like Poetry Archive, which enables people to listen to recordings of poets like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg reading their work, are now enjoying unprecedented success. Poetry Archive , which Mr Motion helped set up, now receives 135,000 visitors a month and a million page hits.

Its “surprising” success had led him to conclude that the real problem with poetry was “not one of appetite, but of delivery”.

source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/4863351/Internet-is-causing-poetry-boom.html

Someone else on the subject.