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...

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