News that Stays News:
An Interview with the Editors of Poetry Daily
The quest for a vital, yet reliable literary website can sometimes make one feel like Roethke's "martyr to a motion." But in the ever-increasing commotion that is the Internet, Poetry Daily—located at www.poems.com—offers poets an ideal place to begin. Founded just over two years ago, the site has experienced a bewildering 4,300,000 hits per month since its inception. With a new poem each day, a vast and continuously updated anthology of contemporary poetry, headline news from the poetry world, and an email newsletter to which approximately 16,000 people already subscribe, Poetry Daily has been called "another challenge to the myth of the non-existent poetry audience."
CROSSROADS Editor: The name of your site emulates that of a daily newspaper, and yet Poetry Daily is simultaneously a pioneer of the new electronic media. How do you feel that Poetry Daily creates a bridge between print media and the Internet?
Don Selby: I wonder who among readers of poetry hasn't had one or both of these experiences: either going to a bookstore to look for poetry journals and magazines, and finding only a couple of beat-up copies of a dated journal, or watching a store customer looking at a shelf of poetry books with a perplexed look on his or her face, maybe fingering an anthology and walking away?
The Web changes so rapidly that it's easy to overlook one of its first and most valuable capabilities: providing easy access to information that otherwise would be missed altogether. And I mean access in more than one sense: first, plain notice that information of interest exists at all—still, these days, mainly in print; second, timely access to that information; and finally, equal access: people in rural and remote settings can have available to them everything that people in urban areas do.
So our first goal for Poetry Daily was to provide quick notice of the range of poetry being published, specifically in print, and where it can be found. And we wanted at the same time to give visitors to PD a feel for those sources in the best way we know of, namely representative poems.
CROSSROADS: I noticed that all of Poetry Daily's poems are culled from paper-based publications. Was that a conscious decision that reflects your estimation of the quality of paper publications versus e-zines or was it simply a way of limiting the field of editorial decisions?
DS: It was more a question of timing and priorities than of quality. As I say, we thought that the first best use of the Web when we began was to get people to the print publications they otherwise surely would never know about. And it took a little while for print-based poetry publishers to get going on the Web.... But we do hope to feature poetry published originally on the Web before too much longer.
CROSSROADS: Have you experienced any hesitation among poets (or their publishers) to have their poetry published on the Web?
DS: Actually, we've never had a poet we've contacted for permission say no. And the only publisher that responded to our initial solicitations to participate in Poetry Daily and said no is Farrar, Straus & Giroux. FSG was very encouraging generally. However, their legal department ultimately said they must decline until they decided what their overall policies would be with respect to the Web.
Rob Anderson: At the very beginning, of course, people had questions. But even from the beginning, I think, people concentrated on the reach and possibilities of the Web. Sure, a given person might sample and decide not to buy a book or journal, but maybe thousands of people will see the work that might never have found it otherwise. Overall, you end up with more readers. The response to Poetry Daily seems to bear this out.... Even some poets who aren't online at all seem to understand this. I get the biggest grins out of those poets who rarely or never use the Internet, but still have enough vision to enthusiastically grant permission to share their work.
CROSSROADS: Could you give an example of the range of poets that you have featured?
DS: Sure: Lucia Perillo, A. R. Ammons, Erin Belieu, Sara McCallum, Richard Blanco, Lucille Clifton, Gerald Stern, Billy Collins, Brenda Shaughnessy, Yusef Koumunyakaa, C. D. Wright, Glyn Maxwell, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Eamon Grennan, Robert Wrigley, Matthea Harvey, Ai, Laura Kasischke, Clarence Major, Campbell McGrath, Bin Ramke, Jane Miller, Bob Hicok, Jacqueline Osherow, Heather Ramsdell, A. E. Stallings, Alberto Rios, Forrest Hamer, Gustaf Sobin, Thomas Lynch, and Susan Wheeler. Also translations of Claire Malroux, Yehuda Amichai, Wislawa Szymborska, Sandor Csoori, Zbigniew Herbert, Michaelangelo, Martial, Ovid, Marin Sorescu, Cristian Popescu....
CROSSROADS: One of the most innovative aspects of your site is the poetry news that it offers, the poetry-world's equivalent of CNN. Who are your sources for breaking news on the poetry front? How do you decide what poetry news is fit to print?
DS: The news page is especially popular with poets, as you might guess. There are some major newspapers that regularly report on poetry and poetry publishing that we pay daily attention to—The New York Times, The Times (London) and the Irish Times come to mind, along with some general interest magazines that have editions on the Web—The New Criterion, The Nation and the like. Atlantic Unbound, the online home of The Atlantic Monthly, is especially good—they present original poetry features even apart from the print magazine. But we do daily searches that produce items that range from reviews in online publications like Salon or Slate to articles from newspapers in Dayton, Sydney, San Antonio, New Delhi...
It's fair to say we've had items ranging from speculation about who was in and who was out in the running to become British Poet Laureate, to long critical pieces about the situation of poetry at the end of the century.
CROSSROADS: This morning, as my coworker read today's poem he suddenly wondered how many people were reading it simultaneously. He imagined his act of reading as being a collective event. Do you have statistics for how many people read your daily poem on a given day?
DS: Yes, we can come pretty close to a count of daily readers. On peak days lately we've had more than 8000 visitors (and, of course, many many more "hits" and "page views") per day. Since the beginning of February 1999 this daily traffic adds up to more than a million individual visits to Poetry Daily. So your coworker is on to something, we think!
RA: It's also interesting to think about where technology might take this collective, but still essentially solitary, Web experience. Even considering that people visit throughout the day, at any given time there are likely hundreds of people reading "Today's Poem." What if they could interact? New products like "Gooey" (www.gooey.com) already allow simultaneous visitors to Web sites to chat in real time, and if such products gained acceptance, spontaneous communities could develop around Web sites.
Diane Boller: We're very pleased at the count of daily online readers, of course. But I'd like to imagine that there are many more of them than the statistics indicate. People who print a poem to show to friends, or to post on a bulletin board, or to read aloud to their classroom are communicating the poem in ways that we just can't count. So even aside from electronic communities, we've been happy to learn from our readers that the daily poem is being discussed among friends and coworkers, and being used in classrooms.
CROSSROADS: Some cultural theorists have pointed out that in the history of technology, new inventions are rarely utilized for their full-range of possibilities. They show how in its early years film, for instance, imitated the structure of staged plays, and only later went on to become a self-sufficient form. They demonstrate similarly how the typewriter merely mimicked the written page, but subsequently led to formal innovations in poetry, as we see in the work of the Futurists. Do you think that the Web is being used to its utmost capacities with respect to the written word? How do you think that the Web will ultimately affect how we read, write and publish poetry?
RA: Well, to broaden your question even further, I don't think anyone, in any field of endeavor, is doing "everything" that's possible on the Net. It's moving too fast, the technology is constantly changing, and there are literally millions of people involved. That makes things a bit chaotic, but that's also what makes it fun.
On the "industry" front, the fact that poets will be able to reach their audience directly may change the publishing model, in much the same way that's predicted for the music industry.
That's not our focus, but certainly there are many folks out there interested in sidestepping the whole "getting published" maze, to just reach their audience directly.
Along those lines, the digerati have been saying for years that micro-payments will support authors. For example, what if thousands of readers were willing to pay pennies for each poem they read online, and you could eliminate all the overhead of creating a print publication? I still think it's a great concept, but right now fees on credit card transactions and the lack of true e-cash have kept that a pipe dream.
On a bit more abstract level, I read an interview with Robert Pinsky not too long ago where he drew parallels between computer technology and poetry. The argument boiled down to the fact that both "bits and bytes" and poetry are compressed forms of data transmission. Maybe this sort of metaphor doesn't speak to non-techies, but it certainly spoke to me. I think Pinsky had a real insight there—at least if I haven't misrepresented his point of view.
No one knows for certain where the Web is going. But on a conceptual level—in our information overloaded "speed of light" society—the poetic form may fit perfectly with the Internet. Wouldn't it be wonderful if poetry were uniquely suited to society in the 21st century?
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