There many experiments in using the World Wide Web to expand access to poetry, even to expand the nature of poetry, poetry workshops, and poetry community. These sites display the variety of this ongoing work.

• Canadian sites
  
• International sites
  
• Hypertext Writing

• ArtsCanada is the CBC's arts and culture site, continuously revised and updated.
• Edgewise Electrolit Centre and Cafe . The EEC brings a rather obscure technology to the community at a grass roots level with Telepoetics, an interactive audio/visual medium for global poetic teleconferences. Any two sites on the planet can be joined with a video-to-telephone interface capable of working over standard, voice-grade lines and linked audiences and artists share a bi-directional transmission. All input is mixed as it occurs, instantly creating a community infused with diversity and multi-culturalism. Telepoetics acts as an international open mic and brings people together regardless of physical or geographic boundaries. Other features are: Poetry Workshop, E-Zine, Bulletin Board, Artists/Writers, and Edgewise Cafe, a literary chat-room, open all day and all night.
• YEAR ZERO ONE is an on-line artist run centre which operates as a network for the dissemination of digital culture and new media through web based exhibitions, an extensive media arts directory, and the YEAR01 Forum - an electronic art journal. YEAR ZERO ONE hosts NomadLingo, a series of FLASH experiments devoted to exploring mobile-text art. Many new levels of meanings are developing as words are animated in ways that are visually suggestive of living organisms. From Montreal.

  [Return to Top]

• Trace Online Poetry Community, from England, contains many resources, an online poet-in-residence, an online reader-in-residence, and includes a hypertext contest. This is truly beautiful and exciting work, making full use of the latest in web technology. An up-to-date web-browser is de rigeur to get all the benefits of this ground-breaking site.
• Brazil gives us Pop Box, a fun site incorporating visual poetry, sound poetry, a Latin chat line in a cute pop-up box, and much else wild and pop goes the weasel.
• Trace also hosts Assemblage, a comprehensive site for women working in new media.
• Alt-X, where the digerati meet the literati, and give them streaming word-dub, a review forum on new media art and theory, grammatron (The Internet Art Classic), virtual publications, black ice fiction (degenerative prose for the hungry masses), and hyper-text work, with a really grungy interface to boot.
• Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry has links to over 200 readings in over 100 cities taking place the last week of March 2001, including international readings on Mt. Everest, in Antarctica and on the West Philippines Sea.
• PilotSearch.Com claims to be the world's largest literary search engine on the net. Think of a Yahoo or Webcrawler exclusively devoted to literature, and you have the idea! Its listings are not complete, but there's an incredible amount there. To wet your whistle, try their haiku sites, their audio poetry sites, and their performance poetry sites.
• Estate of Mind: poetry by Wallace Stevens, illustrations by Mark Napier. Just for fun.
• The Alsop Review features The Gazebo, a high-quality, moderated on-line poetry workshop.
• The Tower of Babel provides a multilingual (very multilingual!) and multicultural home for arts and ideas on the web, complete with painting, music, reviews, manifestos, links and chat rooms, fiction, and poetry, including the poems of Lorca translated into Russian. Where else could you find that? The site is well worth a visit, with discussions and artwork exploring many issues of contemporary world culture, and much else, too. Warning to visitors with old machines or slow connections: the site is graphics-heavy, so it might take a while to load. My advice: sip a drink and come back in a couple minutes. It's worth it, and once you get past the initial graphics, it's pretty quick and clean. You can bypass part of the graphics (but, sadly, part of the fun, too) and go directly to the table of contents.
• Project Equinox presents 251 Poets from 24 Nations Working for World Peace. On the 1996 Autumnal Equinox, poets from all over the globe wrote a poem describing their own world as they saw it. The poems are here. Great idea.
• Craters on the Moon was a one-time event which gathered some of the top talents in the Icelandic cultural craters to produce words with images, weaving together pictures, poems, music, lights, technology and videos.

  [Return to Top]