poetandgeek.com

Welcome to the newly rediscovered land of poet and geek.

There is these days a lot of talk about gadgets in the media and especially here online. Don't get me wrong. Like any self-respecting geek, I love gadgets. But I have to balance that love with the other part of my personality: the part that writes poetry. It seems to me that all this talk of phones and laptops, the internet and email overlooks one crucial point. These gadgets are only as good as the content they show. That they are programmed by us to show. And at the moment that content is not consistently good.

Sometimes it is not good at all.

The point is very simple: these things are (amongst other things!) writing tools. And in that they are very much like a pen or pencil. In fact, I would argue that sometimes pen or pencil are a lot easier and quicker to use. And writers and poets are the natural ones to write the content, to identify, explore and spell out the forms that should flow from the new media. I would argue that writers and poets have been quiet too long on this topic. As a poet, it is particularly the place of poets on the frontiers of text that I am interested in. Where are they? Poets are surely the screenwriters of the Twitter age but instead exist as a forgotten subspecies. We are pushed to the edges of our natural environment by the bullying every day users of text online.

So this small magazine online is here to gather poets together from all over the world, in all languages because allowing us to communicate is one of the things our computer tool machines are good for. Now we are here. We'll do what. That's not for me to say but up to you. Ready to shout, to whisper but above all to articulate the words that everyone is laying claim to all around us.

Time to make poetry.