Patrick Martin: The Web Page/The Poetry Resource is the kind of gem that you”ll find nowhere but on the internet. It is more than a resource – it is a resource of resources. It is the type of place one stumbles into, caught perhaps by the disingenuous site design (it”s been up since 1996, and the site design still feels and looks like it dates from those days), and emerges from hours upon hours later blinking at the sky and wondering where the heck the whole day went.

It starts simply enough, on a black page with poison green accents, with the words:

Welcome. This site is offered as a public service to poets and lovers of poetry. I have an extensive collection of poetry links that are continually updated. My goal is to help make the internet a more useful place for poets and lovers of poetry. Here you will find links to poets working all over the world and in all ranges of craft and styles.

The site is divided into nine sections, each of them listing dozens to hundreds of other sites that are all about poetry. There are “Poets” for sites that feature the work of an individual poet, Publishers, Organizations, Forums, Collections, Search Engines, The World.

There are broken links – many of them – but the inconvenience of hitting a “this site is for sale” or “this page not found” is more than outweighed by the amazing bounty of treasure that you”ll find behind so many of the links. Just a few examples of the sort of riches you”ll find by randomly clicking the links painstakingly collected by Patrick Martin:

Fine Madness under Publishers, a nonprofit poetry journal that is a labor of love for four editors from Washington State, and who are so down to earth that they maintain a list of past contributors whose contributor copies were returned by the post office, asking “if you are this person or know this person, let us know so we can send you your copies”. They also offer three awards of $500 each for work appearing in the current issue.

The Astrophysicist”s Tango Partner Speaks, an online poetry zine on hiatus since 2002, that will strike chords of memory in any poet who was involved in internet reading groups, usenet poetry and poetry groups from the mid-90s through today. There are poems by the likes of Scott Murphy, Gretchin Lair, Jennifer Ley (who created the Tango Partner) and Marek Lugowski.

Martin”s site is one to which you”ll return over and over again to sift through as one would when prospecting for gold or diamonds. There is much to find here, amid the broken links and lost poets, much to make it a worthwhile trip for any poet.