On-line Literary Magazines and Lists

 

By Jim Bennett

 

On Monday I was chatting to Poets in Buffalo N.Y. about the development of Langpo and where they see the post-post-modern avant guarde in the future. On Tuesday It was poets in Cambridge U.K. By the end of the week I had chatted with fifty other poets, some in Australia, others in Europe, two in Russia, the remainder in the U.K. Now if this sounds fanciful then you have not yet got connected to the Internet revolution in communications technology.

As readers of this magazine you will be clued up switched on swinging folk, who may use email and search the web for research links, but have you explored the world of online magazines and lists? There are now a number of respected literary journals on line, even print magazine editors are developing their own on line presence and using their sites for archives, or digest forms of their magazines. Many of these magazines, Poetry Kit and Haiku Talk (see below) are examples, invite readers to submit their email details and to share in on line discussions with other readers. This is what is known as a list, and lists are useful because you can post poems and give and get critiques, as well as joining discussions on related topics. Unlike the available chat lines, which tend to be very on-line-time consuming, the lists are delivered as email. So you go on line briefly once or twice each day to download or send your replies to the previous mail.

More specifically the web provides the opportunity to produce that magazine you always wanted to, but could never get off the ground because of funding. It is true that to publish on the internet you need to find some space to put it in, but to be honest that is the easy bit. There are dozens of site operators who are only too willing to provide space free of charge, and these are better to use in case you want to change your web server at some point, when you would also loose the homepage space they provide.

Having registered for your space, you then need to produce something to go into it, and this is where you have the upper hand. You can use the space for whatever you want, for example you could be a big fan of lop eared bunnies, in which case you could put up pictures of lop eared bunnies to your hearts content. Or you may believe that George Orwell was the greatest Socialist icon of the century and want to set up a site in tribute to him. This may necessitate finding articles, bibliography, creating taxonomies of his work and references and links to other pages on the net containing interesting or related information. Before you know it, and after a lot of publicity links and search engine submissions, your George Orwell site becomes the resource site for anyone searching for information about him. And if you produce each page of your site as you would a print magazine page then you have a web based magazine, which can be completely or partially changed each month. A word of warning about on-line research, don't trust anything you read on the net. it can be a useful indication, especially if the information is posted from a reputable source, but you never know. Your "expert" on the works of Gertrude Stein, for example, may be a person with their own agenda. The net also has the capacity to generate urban myths faster than any other medium I know. So basically always check "facts" that come off the net.

Perhaps the most interesting magazine sites are the less specific arts magazines, which change periodically like print magazines. There are some magazines on-line which change organically, growing and changing as the year passes but never being completely changed for a new edition. Both the periodical and the organic style magazine have their followers and detractors.

Once, seen as trivial, now more serious writers are turning to the net as the advantages of net publishing become apparent. A number of academics write for the web based magazines, first, because it is by far the quickest way to get their paper disseminated among the academic community, secondly because the world wide access is unprecedented in publishing, and thirdly because even when the next edition of the magazine is published the old editions, or at least their archives, stay on line indefinitely and can continue to be referenced by new readers. All of this presupposes that you are only interested in a modest return or, the paper published is designed to develop interest in the book which follows, because the copyright position and control over net based material can be a nightmare.

One of the biggest advantages is built into the format and this is hypertext. Hypertext links are means by which a word or phrase carries an address which can be accessed at the click of a mouse, the new page is then displayed, giving access to other information. In this way a reader is able to sort their way through complex information, picking up on strands relevant to them. In fact so powerful is this technology and the idea of accessibility it generates, that it has crossed over into the print world with the emergence of hypertext books.

It would take a manual the size of the magazine you are holding to list the on-line-magazines which are available, so I will limit myself to just a few of the established titles which have no printed equivalent.

The Poetry Kit - http://www.poetrykit.org

I think the Poetry Kit is one of the most useful sites on the net, Ted Slade the site owner, editor, publisher, and he works hard to bring together lists and pages of information which are of value to poets. Including lists of links to on-line poetry and literary magazines and sites. There is also a magazine section to the Kit which is quarterly and contains some fine poetry from known and unknown writers. It also carries interviews with established poets which are sometimes quite revealing.

Lynx Poetry from Bath - http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html

A splendid magazine of poetry and linked articles about poetry which by the editor's admission is published irregularly. The strength of the magazine is its idiosyncratic selection of material, much of which is very good. The back issues are all available on site and some very contentious articles have been published over the years.

Aabye's Baby - http://www.aabyesbaby.ukpoets.net/

Haiku Talk- http://www.nhi.clara.net/hktalk.htm

Two of a number of major poetry sites in a magazine format from the Gerald England's NHI stable. The quality of the poetry in these sites is outstanding.

New Hope International Review On-Line - http://www.nhi.clara.net/online.htm

A magazine which offers candid reviews of poetry and prose publications from the small presses of the world. A glance through will give some interesting leads to publications which might otherwise be overlooked. There is also an on-line version of

New Hope International Magazine - http://www.nhi.clara.net/nhihome.htm.

A magazine which is always well worth reading.

Most of the web-mags listed have links to other web-mags so take the time to look at 'Jacket'. John Tranter's Australian based magazine which is very good. The Cortland Review is another excellent magazine which uses sound files so you can hear poets reading their own work. But the list is almost endless, and I have a file on my favourites menu which scrolls down the screen three times with lists of magazines I want to return to, including incidentally, Precinct, the University of Liverpool magazine.

Which basically means you can spend your life reading on-line magazines and when people ask about porn on the net you can shrug your shoulders and say "What porn?"

Most of the on-line-magazines follow the standard magazine format, but there is no reason why this should be the case. Exploring hypertext is good, but the editors should start exploring the wider implications of the net "page". The only reason for having a screen size page is to enable it to fit the screen, but net pages in theory can be any size you want to make them. This means that you can construct a page of linked poems, like a field with pages left lying round at random so that the access to them will be determined by the direction the reader wants to go. Or hyper link wormholes taking the reader from one page to another as they pass over an imbedded hotspot. I am sure you get the picture. The possibilities are only restrained by our imagination in using the medium. So how about that magazine you always thought you would like to put together?

Article - Copyright - Jim Bennett 2000 All rights reserved.

Jim Bennett is a writer and lecturer, author of a number of books including most recently, Games for Children (Design Eye 1998), Drums at New Brighton (poetry, shortlisted for the Pendleburry Prize, Starwood, 1999) Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper (Paragon, 1999). His next book Down in Liverpool, links prose and poetry (already the winner of a 1st prize in the Sefton Literary Competition and a winner of the Fante Literary Prize) is due to be published in September 2000 by Starwood Press.