In Competition No. 2579 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of or denouncing the world wide web. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, thorn in the side of Web 2.0, rails against the calamitous effects of user-generated web content on our culture, bemoaning the emergence of ‘digital narcissism’ and the resulting proliferation of inane and banal content in cyberspace. On the whole, you agree with him, although there are a few fans out there. Brian Murdoch begins: ‘I think I should like to perform a celebratory pirouette/ to honour the w.w.w. aka the internet…’.
It was a strong field this week. Mary Holtby and Josh Ekroy deserve a special mention but the winners, printed below, get £25 each. Bill Greenwell nabs the extra fiver.
There isn’t a curfew. Whenever you surf you
Enter a paradise, perfect and plangent,
Where blaggers and bloggers are wrapped in a
fog as
Strange as exotic.
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