An all-British round-up this time. Maybe it's just the luck of the draw, but it does seem at the moment, there's an edge to sites with .uk at the end.
Ted Slade's Poetry Self-help Kit at http://www.kingston.ac.uk/~bs_s474/1 is for the aspiring poet looking for a leg-up. Useful books, courses, magazines and competitions are listed. It's new, and as yet a bit patchy. If you've a poetry-related organisation you'd like to publicise, you could do worse than drop him an e-mail.
The Poetry Library have started up at http://www.rfh.org.uk/poetry/index.htm2 They include a programme for readings at the Voice Box, and also a cyberspace version of their famous "lost quotations" notice board. This could be useful, but needs a few more contributions to get it off the ground.
Ted Burford's ambitious objective for his new on-line Limestone magazine at http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~limested/ is for it to host poems of the same quality as you find in Poetry Review. I have my doubts whether the Internet poetry community is ready for this, but it's a laudable aim. It also has the merit of a simple layout. No irritating frames; no fancy and interminable graphics; and certainly no naff background music.
Gerald England's New Hope International site is another with fairly straightforward layout. It has details of publications, sample poems and a number of unusual links at http://www.nhi.clara.net/nhihome.htm3
The Scottish magazine Chapman also has a taster at http://www.compura.com/chapman/ with a generous selection of its contents, and the worst colour scheme I've seen for ages. Jon Corelis' idiosyncratic review of the British poetry scene may well raise your eyebrows; set your browser to override the document colours if you want to avoid eyestrain as well.
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Copyright © Peter Howard 1997-2004
1This became The Poetry Kit and moved to http://www.poetrykit.org.
2The Poetry Library has moved to http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/.
3New Hope International is now at http://www.geraldengland.co.uk/.