Going Down On Your Permanent Record

It isn't just The Violent Femmes who have to concern themselves with permanent records.

Poets, since antiquity - and perhaps, most famously, Horace (pictured) - then Shakespeare - have written of how (their) poems outlast gilded monuments and marble, to give famed life to a bravura poem that outlasts any normal subjects or objects.

Poetry, then, as the gift that keeps on giving, a kind of quasi-vampiric pulse in the textual neck, even after the body's cold as granite.

More recently, as poetry has moved to "inscription" online, in electronic form, old-school poets and publishers have lamented the loss of books, of paper, of tactile reading, and, indeed, even of writing itself. How ironic it is, then, that it may be the internet, in some form or another, that outlasts the libaries so much traditional store has been placed in.

The British Library is helping to articulate this exquisite irony.

As a founding member of the UK Web Archiving Consortium, it is running a two-year pilot project to determine the long-term feasibility of archiving selected web sites and has asked Nthposition to take part.

Nthposition is Val Stevenson's well-regarded web magazine, which I edit the poetry for, and which has been running since 2002.

Nthposition will, if the pilot succeeds, remain available to researchers as part of its permanent collection, and the library undertakes to ensure that it remains accessible even if today's hardware and software become irrelevant. In other words, poetry recorded digitally, lasting forever.

Perhaps, soon enough, more poets will be clamouring for such e-publication, after all...

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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