The Epoetry Center at wings.buffalo.edu is a collection of poetry on the internet – but it”s far more than that. It is E-Poetry – an International Digital Poetry Center, with poetry that cuts across national and international borders to offer a new way to share and disseminate poetry. In his introduction to Digital Poetics, Loss Pequeno Glazier speaks of circulation and distribution of poetry as being a key element in its popular rise – and this era of desktop publishing, eZines and digital broadcasting opens new avenues of poetic distribution for all poets. Anyone with a reasonable command of basic editing can publish a professional looking chapbook, broadsides and other forms of poetry distributing. The possibilities inherent in the net, though – with Flash and action scripts, with javascript and html and animation and all the tools of the web – when combined with poetry can lift poetry off the page and make it three and four dimensional.
Setting aside for the moment whether or not it is still poetry when you combine it with electonic media collage/montage, when you stretch the words with images and push the envelope, you”ll find a large collection of what is loosely termed e-poetry at EPC. I say loosely because there is no true definiton. One entry in the directory may be simply the text of a poem… another may be an audio file of a poem being read – and yet another a full production that resembles a music video. There is certainly art here, and artistry, and poetry is a part of it. This is perhaps not a resource in the same way that a writer”s workshop or a book of forms is a resource – but it is still a resource… a documentation of the directions that poetry can take when it is given wings.
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