It's not unusual that online magazines close down - and it's sadly even not unusual that they fold completely, and withdraw the online pages from the web, blanking out all words and images once published. Not so Postal Poetry: here's a magazine that closed - then went ahead and created a new archive page that now showcases all published postcards! You can find it all here: Postal Poetry.
Contributor include: Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Christine Swint, Jean Morris, Fernando de Sousa, Marja-Leena Rathje, Jennifer Saunders, and many others. Make sure to click the first postcard "The Way to America"- it's the starting point of the project that now finally found a place, too.
About Postal Poetry + Videopoems
Postal Poetry was published by Dave Bonta and Dana Guthrie Martin. Read more about the story of Postal Poetry in the 'About' section of the archive - and if you are interested in digital poetry, then make sure to visit Dave Bonta's new web project Moving Poems, it features videopoems, filmpoems and animated poems from around the web.
A Note on Lost and Found Online Magazines
Online literary magazines that went offline are also one of feature themes of the BluePrintReview issue "re/visit" - some research on the theme brought a surprise back then: some of the online literary magazines that had gone offline and were considered lost together with all their content turned out to be still available in parts, in the web archives of the Waybackmachine, here's an article with 'lost' links: Lost, Found, Dead + Alive: Online Literary Magazines.
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website: Postal Poetry.
Thanks for the feature! My co-editor and I are equally to blame for letting the old Postal Poetry lapse, in the usual way of such things, I suppose. But as a librarian's son I find it difficult to see a periodical vanish without a trace, and for some reason PP was barely archived by the Wayback Machine -- which was irrelevant anyway, since images were the whole point and the Wayback Machine only grabs text, I think. This time I backed the site up with a private mirror site on WordPress.com, so if something happens to my webhost or if I get hacked, the site will be easy to revive simply by changing the nameservers at the registrar and changing the status of the mirror to public. WordPress.com does charge a yearly fee to map an independent domain to one of its subdomains, though, so it's cheaper for me just to house the site at a free subdomain of vianegativa.us. The site design would probably be a drain on server CPU above a fairly low traffic level, but it seems fine for a rarely visited archive. Designing a site that I don't expect to be updated or to receive many visitors was kind of novelty for me!
ReplyDeleteFor your list of long-running literary magazines, Pif goes back to October 1996, and has even managed to update to a modern CMS and bring all its archives along. And Brevity has been going since Fall 1997. Those are the first two online magazines I ever submitted to.
I think it is great that online mags create archives. It is so easy to find a way to maintain one :) I'm working on the same thing for "Shape of a Box"
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