A Little Good News . . .

Guess what? Despite the bleak global in-the-dust bust, The Telegraph's Arts Correspondent, Stephen Adams (no relation to The Globe and Mail's Sweet Baby James), reports the 'Net's effecting a boom in poetry, the likes of which no one anticipated. Even its creators agree on that score: Poet Richard Price, for example, the gentleman who heads up modern collections at the British Library, believes computers exponentially accelerate the art's proliferation: "What's interesting," he observes, "is it's counter-intuitive. You would have thought that poetry and pamphlets would be failing in the face of the internet, but that isn't happening."

The UK's Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion — who just completed a new collection of work himself — concurs, positing the notion the medium suits the message to a P: "Poetry is as much to do with the noise the poem makes as about what the words mean when written on a page . . . It is crucially an oral form — its character depends on it." (Of course, on this point, I brag to differ; but, that's another notion, Mr. Poetry-in-Motion.)

No problemo; though, what (or who) gives good PoVo? Welp, it seems WriteSites such as the Poetry Foundation, ArtsJournal, YouTube, the Poetry Archive and the like, which enable people to listen to recordings of luminaries such as Plath, Eliot, WCW, Atwood, Larkin, Sexton, Ginsberg, et.al. reading their work, now enjoy such unprecedented success that the Poetry Archive alone (which Mr. Motion helped create) now receives 135,000 monthly visitors (or, more precisely, a million hits per month). The phenom engendered the proverbial "Eureka! Moment" for the ubiquitous PL: "Its 'surprising' success led him to conclude that the real problem with poetry was 'not one of appetite, but of delivery.'"

If, on the off chance you hunger for a Whitmaniacal bite, have a peek-see at this not-to-miss Cyber-BitStop featuring a 36-second wax-cylinder sampling of the maestro's voice reading four lines from "America."

BTW, Dear Readers, should you know of any audio-visual poetic BiteSites — or, if you've got 'em, flaunt 'em — please, feel free to leave a comment at the sound of the tone :) . . .