Shelley Howells: Poetry, but not as we know it

While wandering about the web checking out free online editions of the classics, I concluded that without a portable reading device even the great novels are a right bore to read on screen.

Everything from Shakespeare to Poe to Lewis Carroll is available at sites such as Project Gutenberg.

But it involves too much squinting and hunching and not enough duvet.

However, poetry and the net are a perfect match, I think.

What does an expert have to say?

After a lengthy, pathetic faffing around online trying to find an email address for Top Literary Bloke Bill Manhire, I try the old-fashioned way.

Seconds later, he is on the phone from Victoria University, agreeing with my penetrating assessment.

"Poetry works very well on the internet, mainly because poems these days are short."

Homer's epics would make right tedious scrolling but, since the novel took over much of the epic poets' territory, poems have become less of a mouthful and, coincidentally, rather screen-friendly.

Manhire doesn't agree that the web will necessarily make poetry more popular.

"Poetry has always been popular. It just doesn't have commodity value. If I tried to sell a poem on the street, nobody would give me a cent," he reckons.

"But go to any wedding, funeral or naming ceremony and you'll hear poems. In those big rite-of-passage moments, poetry is always there."

The big benefit of publishing poetry on the web is that it's an ideal way for poets to overcome the daunting task of getting their words out there.

"Distribution problems are worse for New Zealand poets than anyone," he says.

The gaping oceans between us and major markets, and the high cost of producing poetry in book form, make publication and distribution a big ask.

Manhire's online project, Best New Zealand Poems (www.vuw.ac. nz/modernletters/bnzp), is a site he created to "make a range of the best New Zealand poetry available to readers in and outside New Zealand".

More than half the visitors to the site are from overseas.

To prevent a particular style or taste dominating the selection process, the editorship changes annually.

Last year's editor was Elizabeth Smither. Robin Dudding is doing the honours for 2003.

As well as the 25 newly published poems chosen each year, visitors to the site can link to publishers and New Zealand literary sites, poet bios, and poets' comments on their work.

For this reader at least, this "more bang for your verse" approach can be much more satisfying than simply reading a poem on a page.

In fact, some online poets have gone for way more than the words-on-a-page look, and have used web-specific wizardry such as hypertext and Flash animation in - and as - their work.

So will the net change the face of poetry?

Not yet, says Manhire. "I'm sure it will, though."

Most efforts so far have been the work of the techies. He believes that, once poets catch up with the technology, online poets will create a new form.

Manhire has had a bash at it himself with his "slightly experimental number" The Asterisk Machine, which is available on the superb online poetry resource NZ Electronic Poetry Centre (www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz).

It seems that any gadget with a screen is enough to bring out our inner bard.

Last year's Guardian SMS poetry competition (books.guardian.co.uk/textpoetry) attracted 7500 entries.

The technology has a way to go, though - fourth-place winner Mandy Coe gets such bad mobile reception in her part of Liverpool that she had to stand on a chair in the garden to send her entry.

US horror writer Michael A. Arnzen (born in Amityville, appropriately enough) uses the Palm Pilot to spread his horror poetry.

Readers can get a poetic chill sent direct to their Palm, or check out his latest "gorelet" on the website (www.gorelets.com), which also has a virtual fridge covered with horrific magnetic poetry words that visitors can click-and-drag to create their own dastardly ditties.

The site features some of his "animated text experiments", or e-poems.

Ghosted is a deliciously chilly example, in which the poem's words leap, creep and slither out at you from a gloomy background, forcing you to go at the author's pace.

It's poetry, Jim, but not as we know it.

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