In 2001, Poetry International established the ‘Poetry International Web’ (PIW) Foundation, which set out to give people access to poetry from many countries in the world by the hell of the Internet. The website is a great success, now attracting some 1200 unique visitors a day from all over the world. And each week we welcome more. Poetry and the Internet are hitting it off far better than many of us expected. In 2003, Holland’s outgoing poet laureate Gerrit Komrij, inaugurating a poetry site for the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, spoke these immortal words: “Poetry at last has found its ideal partner. It has made it more fluid, more agile, you name it. Paper is after all more like – a gravestone. It’s final. The computer screen renews, rejuvenates, it allows for addition and relegation to the trash – it’s mobile, it’s versatile. It’s just the thing for poetry.”

The website
www.poetryinternational.org has been online since November 6, 2002, providing anyone with access to a computer anywhere in the world, with an opportunity to meet poetry, poets, and a country. Countries participating to date are Australia, Greece, Portugal, China, India, Slovenia, Colombia, Israel, South Africa, Croatia, Italy, Ukraine, France, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Germany, Netherlands.

In these countries organisations and editors make their national poetry accessible in their own language and in English translation. They collaborate with the central editor in Rotterdam in preparing a versatile digital magazine, which serves as an up-to-date source of information on international poetry. Five more countries, England and Belgium among them, are wishing to join. PIW has set its sights on forty countries within the next five years.

The quality of the poetry and translations is high, as is the standard of maintaining the site’s versatility and topicality. These standards operate independently of such notions as First, Second, or Third World, even without taking account of the difference between countries that are fully digitalised and those we think are not. One of the site’s best domains is Zimbabwe, brimming with amazing, beautiful poetry, a domain which constantly renews itself and is truly representative of that country’s poetry. Not surprisingly, for Zimbabwe’s poets the site is their one and only window to the outside world to air their voice. A free voice, that is, so long as the Internet escapes the watchful eye of the authorities.

European countries seem to be having more trouble building a satisfactory domain on this international poetry site. In many of them government culture budgets have to be shared out among hundreds of projects. Most of them serving only a national purpose, and what is available for international literary projects has to be divided between several organisations, each claiming the honour of being their country’s poetry ambassador to the world. Yet the European countries taking part in the site, find it a superb opportunity to distribute their poetry around the world in a simpler and livelier manner than by way of a book.

The festival
The website is a rich source of poetry and information for magazine editors, publishers and festival planners. Poetry International, which instigated the plan for the site in 2001, itself benefits from it. Poetry International annually stages the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, which is one of the world’s leading poetry festivals. Through the international website, the festival can tap into an enormously rich source, not only to feed a public which needs more than an annual festival to still its appetite, but also to keep up with developments in international poetry.

“Evening explodes in my hand, my hand and fingers unravel a hot clumsy hand stitches darkness in zigzag the orange exploded in my hand the orange spits blood evening is crowded in an old tin can The sea gathers in my lap I stroke its head Sleep and be silent the sea the sea–” Ella Bat-Tsion (Israel), a participant of the festival. Above passage has been taken from his ‘The orange exploded in my hand’.