The Poetry Scene

• The public, sociologists, performance poets and literature lecturers have different views on what poetry is. It isn't just the canon, or even books and magazines. It's an interaction between those stable elements and the flickering schools of interpretations and poets.
• The WWW will strengthen the minorities (those united by temperament rather than location) so that more people can engage in this wider concept of poetry which in turn will make poetry less monolithic, and certainly less nation-based.
• The WWW already has its own cafes, magazines and venues for reading. It will increasingly affect what poetry is available: web texts are less dependent on market forces (indeed, because of copyright issues, it's easier to find the work of unpopular authors than of famous ones). Since authors can control the means of production, they can choose audio rather than text, returning to an emphasis on poetry as voice, which again might influence the way people think of poetry.
• With new movements gaining momentum and reaching critical mass more rapidly, with more interdisciplinary interest in poetry, and with poets having greater flexibility of personae, changes in poetry as a social construct will accelerate, especially as more paper poets move to the WWW.