Beyond the Page and Person paywalls

Some thoughts about the past, present and future of poetry on the internet

I’ve been thinking a lot about platforms and how artists share their work online and offline. In the past, poets like myself relied on books (or the paper paywall) and performance (the person paywall)to share our work. When the internet intruded on this existence it served as a convenience to bolster the other two. No serious, respected poet was sharing all of their work online. Books and gigs weren’t just a means to an income, they still make the slimmest part of a poet’s revenue, but they were a signifier of prestige and status. You were often implicitly judged on where you were published and/or where you were booked to perform. Prizes also factored into this and still do.

Problems arose when people wanted to read your work but a lot of it was paywalled off in these more traditional media and if you shared work beyond a private social network then it tended to be older, B-tier stuff. Therefore the work that people tended to see first was the work you weren’t too keen to be known by. In the meantime your best work hid in slim volumes, in short runs of magazines or in the low-fidelity memories of those who saw you perform live.

Things carried on like this until some poets took the internet seriously and made it their sole place for engagement and sharing their work. The avant-garde of internet poets were experimental as early adopters tend to be but then other poets started sharing work on social media and found bigger audiences than the paper paywall could ever give them. Not only only this but, despite being able to read everything online, these audiences were happy to also support the poets through buying books, going to gigs or supporting the poet’s work through Ko-fi or Patreon.

As can be expected, their work wasn’t written for a smaller niche audience of poetry enthusiasts and therefore differed stylistically from the work that had been published by the prestige presses of the paper paywall. That was until some of those prestige presses got wind of the sales they were missing out on and courted the popular poets too.

This didn’t go down well in the niche world of the paper paywall and eminent male editors commissioned hit pieces from young female poets and journalists in order to avoid the flack they would inevitably catch if they wrote them themselves. The young, female hit piece writers would then catch all the flack from readerships who already associated any form of criticism as an attack, though many of the hit pieces were mean spirited in their approach. Still, I personally don’t like pile ons, especially when they’re pointed at ambitious young writers who see it as the only opportunity they have to get their foot in the door with a prestige press.

Much like the emergence of page/stage hybrid poets in the 90s-00s, prestige/online poetry hybrids started to emerge too. Their work had that playful, intimate register that was evident with some of the online poets while at the same time borrowing more rarified elements from the prestige world. This particular style is something that I have called the “neurotic style” in the sense that the poem gives the impression of being inside the head of the poet, with lines resembling the transience of how thoughts and sensations pop in and out of our minds. Much like Joyce’s stream of consciousness, the seeming spontaneity of the work is itself more crafted and intentional than the style might suggest.

As decades separate us further from the page/stage ethos that defined the end of the 20th Century it is not necessarily easy to see which way things will turn. The prestige scene has become more diverse as new generations break through and yet books sales seem to be the same as before, though the rising costs of running a publisher make most presses a risky and fiscally unrewarding venture.

The performance scene is still reeling from the effects of the covid pandemic with it being more difficult to run events safely within cramped, intimate venues. For all the issues that come with their openness, open mics were often hotbeds of innovation that the mentoring schemes of poetry organisations have not been able to replicate. The impersonal, precious earnestness of the traditional poetry reading found a perfect digital platform in the obligatory importance of the zoom meeting.

The online platforms that launched poets into the stratosphere in terms of popularity are not as reliable as they seemed, with algorithms exerting a stranglehold on a poem’s ability to go viral. Other sites shift and change from adversarial echo-chambers to full-on alt-right cesspits at the whims of their boards or owners. At the same time, much is being written about Gen Z reacting against their terminally online Millennial predecessors by embracing point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones, devices that are still digital but place some distance between the tech and the immediate creation of online content.

I have no idea how this will turn out. Short of wiping out humanity, you can’t kill poetry –⁠ the pleasure centres of language are embedded too deeply inside the human brain. But the ways in which we share our work and scramble to engage with audiences seem to be set on platforms that constantly spring up and collapse on a bedrock that sits on ever shifting tectonic plates.

My own career stands as testament to the fact that I have no idea how to create something that becomes hugely popular online, and yet, now more than ever, I am convinced that the best way forward is to become more autonomous and exert more control over where we host our creations.

——-

A belated Happy New Year! This is the first in a series of posts where I think aloud about platforms and their relations to poetry and other art forms. A lot of the thoughts I’m having about this have been inspired by this excellent article by Cory Doctorow about the “enshittification” of the internet.

If you are reading this post on my substack then I will also be posting some poems and a Rusty Niall podcast soon, if you’re into that kind of thing. If you want to read some rougher, hot-off-the-press stuff then you might like to check out my write.as where I’m posting a lot of early drafts and fragments.

Ultimately, I’m once again making a new version of my website which will be the canonical home of all of my content which I will then syndicate to other platforms, be they mastodon, write.as, substack or the other places.