Covent Garden London
The heart of London's West End
Surf Report
Poetry Society.
http://www.poetrysoc.com
Whilst doing a bit of web house-keeping. I discovered that a number of the links were no longer valid, or ahem, had been mistyped. One of those was the web of the Poetry Society. So I fixed the problem, and cap and hand visited the site.
For such a literary subject as poetry the site is initially visualy rewording with lovely contemporary graphics and neat navigation system.
However when you start to visit the internal pages sometimes the fonts change, images don't load and links go to unexpected places. At the time of writing (August 1999), the Cafe is undergoing some building work. Perhaps when they return in September they will have time to focus on their web site.
Some events at the Cafe seem very interesting especially the Slam competition where contestants have to write a poem in 30 minutes, then perfrom it, if you get through to the next round you have just 15 minutes. The finalist have just 5 minutes to write and then perform their work!
A nice feature was a list of new additions to the site on the home page, but it was hidden at the bottom of the page and not initially visable on my 800 x 600 browser without scrolling below. I didn't see it until I was leaving, when I took the screen grab above!
A feature on pop songwriters look promising, but they missed the oportunity to include lyric examples themselves and offered an essay. There is a large amount of interesting content, but it's difficult to find and the visual look is variable, sometimes being very well presented with a smashing contemporary look but sometimes...
I hoped that after a few minutes surfing through the archive I'd be coming over all Bard like. Alas, it was not to be. There are poems on the site, but they're tucked away within sub-sections. I wanted to read poems straight away!
- A few useful features here would be;
- links to the poems from the front page.
- a search facility (if only for dirty words for a chuckle).
- adding audio of spoken-word / performance poetry so we can really enjoy the work.
- an online bookshop.
There is a great deal of material on this site, but it sometimes feels like something of a missed opportunity. Please visit the site, if you search you'll find plenty to keep you occupied and if the site is visited it will hopefully encourage the Poetry Society to make additional developments.
Liam DelaHunty
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