Things change rapidly on the web, so I'll mention some sites that show promise, but are still under construction as I write.The new Welsh Academi web site at http://www.academi.org looks as if it could become a immensely valuable noticeboard for poetry in Wales. It already has events listings and information about the Ty Newydd writing centre, and placeholders for stuff on residencies, publications and more.
David Kennedy has started a personal site at http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/6516. This has some uncollected poetry, criticism and a fascinating experimental page of Cut-ups, Foldins, and BatMemes.
Sound Eye at http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_index.htm declares itself to be concerned with Irish Poetry & the Universe of Writing. It has an events list (which needed updating when I visited1) and samples of poetry from Maurice Scully, Brian Coffey, Trevor Joyce and others. It's interesting, but needs a bit more work to live up to its aspirations.
Poetry newsgroups ought to be a good idea, but don't seem to work in practice. More successful are the poetry mailing lists that have been springing up recently. Perhaps it's because they have a nominal owner, who can influence the tone and direction of each list. An unusual one is Mairead Byrne's Ictus. On many lists, discussion of war and poetry is controversial, but this one was set up just for that purpose. If that interests you, visit http://ictus.listbot.com to join.
Flash fiction is a condensed form of writing somewhere between prose poetry and short stories, and it seems to be growing in popularity on the Web. If you want to investigate it, the Furious Fictions site at http://www.slip.net/%7Effiction/index.html is a good place to start. And if you like your stories really short, try Story Bytes at http://thor.he.net/~stories/ where all the stories have word lengths of a power of two.
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Copyright © Peter Howard 1999-2004
1The events list still hasn't been updated.