Editorial

Kia ora.
Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to be in Buffalo, NY about the time of the E-Poetry 2001 Festival. Arriving at 2 am after a many-legged flight from Auckland I was quickly lost in a white-out blizzard, trying to cope with airport ring-roads and keeping to the foreign side of a rapidly disappearing highway. Eventually I found my hotel, a few hours sleep and Niagara Falls covered in ice, before spending a night doing the rounds of bars with e-poets from Buffalo, Germany, Canada, Australia, and London. Their talk was as much about the latest version of Flash, listservs and javascript as it was about poetic theory. What struck me most was their total immersion in the electronic medium - the creative challenges of multimedia and hypertext, the immediacy of instant publication and criticism.

Buffalo may sound like a strange place for a poetry stronghold - known previously to me only by the song "Buffalo Gals" - but is the home of the Electronic Poetry Center.  Started in 1995 the Center is the hub of contemporary poetry on the Internet, providing an edited collection of primary literary texts . It is also the inspiration for the recently launched New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre - a project developed by poet Michele Leggott and the University of Auckland Library and supported by Auckland University Press. It aims to be the gateway to New Zealand poetry on the Internet and already features 300 pages of poetry, criticism, sound and video files and archival material, as well as links to other online New Zealand poetry.

Trout Nine has been a long time coming this year. Apologies to those who were expecting something before winter. One advantage of such a delay is a wealth of content. New work from Elizabeth Smither, Nick Ascroft, Raewyn Alexander and Stephen Oliver, and poems and prose from a number of new and previously published writers. We are also delighted to publish ink drawings by well known author Albert Wendt and poems by artist John Pule.

Robert is away in Hawaii on a writing fellowship, Tony is working on a site redesign for Trout Ten and I am looking forward to a summer holiday.

Na
Brian Flaherty
Co-editor, Trout

© 2001 Trout &
Brian Flaherty