POETRY.COM: Verse on the Internet.

Surfing in the ocean means staying close to shore. You may court drowning, concussions, bruises, and broken bones--and, more frighteningly, your life veers perilously close to a Beach Boy song--but geographically your adventure is pretty tame.

Surfing the Internet, on the other hand, means wending the digital equivalent of a journey, departing from the familiar (the portal of your Internet provider) to voyage, Web page by Web page, link by link, into unfamiliar territory--Virtual Finland, say, or the Asian Mustard nook in the world's largest online mustard store. The journey can be an eye-opener in more ways than one. Encountering the useful and the useless, the esoteric, the eccentric, the personal, and the crassly commercial can make you marvel at the sheer quantity, and diversity, of the human energy percolating out there in the world.

And then, of course, there's always the possibility that you may cyber-stumble across something truly valuable. Still a relative neophyte to dot-com/dot-org realms, for example, I have recently discovered the Internet to be an inestimable resource for poetry.

The discovery astonished me because one hears so much about the incompatibility of literary and Information Age culture--people don't read anymore; they don't write letters, and so on. But, as it turns out, a significant amount of poetry is enmeshed in the Web these days: the classics, right out of English 101; contemporary verse, posted on publishing-house sites and elsewhere; e-poetry, custom-crafted for the virtual page; holiday poetry, like Robert Burns's "Halloween," online back in October courtesy of an enthusiastic resident of Poultney, Vermont; amateurs' works; an International Poetry Hall of Fame; and more. The Net may provide the answer when you're trying to place the author of that famous line. And, as I've found, the Net can help you--and even entice you--to expand your poetical horizons.

It was National Poetry Month, back in April, that lured me to the world of online stanzas. In honor of the month (which the Academy of American Poets invented back in 1996), Knopf had advertised its Poem-a-Day service, and one day in a burst of literary enthusiasm, I signed up from my office computer. All the authors whose works Knopf e-mailed, unsurprisingly, were published by Knopf: On the Web, content rarely veers far from commercialism. But since you can do a lot worse than a Knopf poet (the house publishes Mark Strand and W.S. Merwin, to name two), the service was a luxury. I read works by authors I barely knew, and gained a taste for the poems of Anne Michaels, whom I'd never even heard of.

And the experience had a philosophical dimension, as well as an aesthetic one. There's something soothing about a poem that blitzes into a prosaic workday. Deadlines and to-do lists, seeming to pale in significance, become less intimidating, and minutes spent in mundane tasks (filling out Federal Express slips, for instance) feel less sterile. If you're given to pausing en route through the shambles of your in box to think, "Really, what is the point of it all?" there's comfort in that link to the "ideal order" (in T.S. Eliot's words) of literature, past and present.

Starting around mid-May, I found myself sorely missing my daily e-mailed poems--missing them so much, in fact, that I bemoaned my loss to a friend who happens to be a Web-surfing pro. In a matter of seconds he'd polished off a Web search (via the choice search engine Google), and signed me up for a new poem-a-day service from www. daytips. com, which will also e-mail you daily garden tips, daily jazz updates, daily recipes, daily Dear Abby columns, and much, much more. Now, the folks at DayTips are not exactly literary philanthropists, and my poems these days come sandwiched between lines of advertising copy--free trial software! win a $2,500 shopping spree! personalized horoscopes! But if you scroll past those banners, you find a work that may be old or new, familiar or esoteric--from obscure Yeats to canonical Anne Bradstreet to, recently, Bruce Weigl's antiwar "Song of Napalm"--along with a succinct but informative author bio.

In any case, the ads, if you're in the right frame of mind, can resonate almost symphonically with the poetry. They may, on occasion, harmonize: an excerpt from Christina Rossetti's erotically overtoned "Goblin Market," for example, seemed in tune with that day's sales pitch: webpersonals.com give you a way to choose the people that you meet! Or, on the other hand, the ads may blare in vulgar dissonance, tempting you from an elegy with a credit card reduction service!: if you have $5,000 or more in credit card debt and are paying high interest rates. Annoying, sure, but you may pause to shake your head at the astounding grab-bag that is human experience--and that moment of reflection is, in itself, not unsatisfying.

The opportunity to revel in literature and marketing's rich polyphony is just one of the benefits you can derive from reading verse online. More extravagant than my daily e-mails are the Web sites that turn poetry into a multimedia event--the sound and video archives of the Favorite Poem Project, for instance (www.favoritepoem.org). This mammoth audio visual initiative, spearheaded by the former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, has recruited Americans of all professions and backgrounds to record a poem of their choosing. On the project's Web site, you can watch rather jerky video footage of selected participants, like a glass blower in Seattle who reads Frank O'Hara's "Poem," and an account manager in Stockton, California, who took on Wilfred Owens's "Dulce et Decorum Est." President and Mrs. Clinton still sound like politicians as they proclaim Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" and Howard Nemerov's "The Makers" respectively, but the recitals, and informally expressed thoughts, of the noncelebrities are curiously moving. The enjoyment of poetry is a private, personal business--when a complete stranger shares such an intimacy with you, you feel honored.

There's a disorienting quality to the Favorite Poem videos, too, caused by the apparent presence of a person in the nothingness of cyberspace. In general, though, the disjunction between the virtual world, in which the online poems exist, and the sensual world, which those poems frequently describe, works to the advantage of the verse. After a bout of surfing, the other day, I found myself reading Michael Ondaatje's "Inner Tube," which evokes a rafting trip down an eddying river. Ondaatje's (The English Patient) lines nearly made me seasick--and the sensation was all the more vivid because my Web surfing had made me feel becalmed.

Poetry.com's "100 Greatest Poems Ever Written" section (where I found "Inner Tube") happens to be a sideline to that Web site's principal trade--the posting of amateur verse. Would-be bards can compete in the site's daily and monthly contests (entries to the monthly contests appear immediately on the Web site), and for a sum, poetry.com will emblazon poems on tote bags, aprons, coffee mugs, mouse pads, and other household items.

There's room for all in the universe of online poetry. If you'd like quick confirmation, just scan for "poetry" on Google-- in a split second, the search engine comes up with 4.5 million entries.