Poetry, not to mention writing in general, is ripe for a shake-up. The internet is a territory. The territory is vast. Poetry, impotent, is little more than data in this ever expanding structure. Impotent, it can not affect the structure.
Or can it?
I would like to propose a different approach to poetry, to writing: poetry as action. Poetry as structure. To do so, we may need to let go of traditional ideas of literature and poetry, before we can rediscover it for the internet era.
Forget Twitter, Facebook, Youtube. Contrary to what you may have heard, they are not the new voice of poetry. They are content. Text. Images. Mere data. Poetry was never just content. It is not the spirit of poetry. Once it became content, it became passive, an invalid.
If the territory is the internet, how can poetry reclaim its space?
I propose, to start with, a little experiment. Publish your poem as a domain. Don't let it disappear as content on a page on a website somewhere. Give it an identity. Do you remember the milliondollarhomepage.com sensation? If it hadn't its own domain, would you have remembered it? Enough said.
Make the domain the title of the poem. Did you ever think of the possibilities? Poetry enters the internet by name, no longer as footnote. The title of the poem on the page becomes unnecessary. The poem itself can shine. Let me repeat: The name of the website is the name of the poem. Simple as.
A signature isn't needed. Not everyone is interested in the poet anyway. In an era where, following Barthes, the author is redundant, incognito is just as appropriate. A whois lookup may reveal a subtler gesture. Or nothing.
Liberated, the poem is allowed to shine.
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