Since April I have had a job which, for a poet, is practically unheard of: without history, precedent, or even an exact description. I have been a Virtual Poet in Residence. Even the title is a misnomer. I am not so much a Virtual Poet in Residence as a Poet in Virtual Residence. In an exact description, I am writer-in-residence to the Chadwyck-Healey online poetry database.

The idea of poets in residence is not new. Poets have taken many different residencies in recent years: to universities, to school communities, even to hospitals, as I was some years ago in the National Maternity Hospital.

In fact, Matthew Sweeney inaugurated this on-line residency before me. In theory, any residency brings the poet closer to the community, and attempts to exchange the secrets and treasures of the art between reader and writer. But there are no walls or doors or windows to this residency. I preside, all alone, over a strange and shadowy world. If I were romantic, I would say it was a vast underground vault of words and cadences. But if I were practical and plain, I would emphasise that it was a database. And both are true.

How does the residency work? Each fortnight or so I write profiles of poets, a master class of technical description, some history, some references to my own poems which have already been recorded.

So far, so good. This is not different from anything else I have done as a poet. It ties in with my teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford and some of the writing I am already working on. It is substantially the same as many poets are already doing. What happens next is what makes the difference.

When I finish writing, usually at night - whether in Stanford or Dublin - I send the text. It therefore slides across the mysterious edge of email, away from the airs and darknesses of northern California or Dundrum into a waiting space which is already an English morning.

There the Chadwyck-Healey webmaster takes it and recasts it. There, detached from its utilitarian mode of transport, it ceases to be random argument or argumentative reference and is refined and shimmered and dissolved into that new benchmark of our cultural world: a website. Anybody who logs on (with a licenced subscription through an institution) to the evocative web address (http://lion.chadwyck.com) will find the end result of all this.

Not just my words, either. But also a chance to hear real audio poetry, to look at 11 databases, from 18th-century English to African-American poetry, and to face facts: none of this is free. It is by subscription only. Welcome to a very new, very different and, almost certainly, prophetic world of literature.

The duties of a Virtual Poet-in-Residence are appropriately defined in a shadow world: between night and day, between Internet service providers, between precedent and the lack of it. But most importantly and most poignantly, between the past and future. John Clare never held this job.

Nor did Lorine Neidecker. Nor Emily Dickinson. Nor Patrick Kavanagh.

From now on, whether we like it or not - and a brief visit to the Chadwyck site will confirm it - these shadow definitions will happen more and more.

Even the most cursory tour of this site, let alone others on the web, will show what amounts to a revolution.

I look around me as Virtual Poet-in-Residence and I am amazed. Launched at the end of 1996, and now available to scholars and a new generation of teachers, this cyber collection of poetry at Chadwyck-Healey literally exceeds what any library can achieve in that mysterious mix of volume and compression which it offers.

As I look at the sheer quantity and accumulation of what is on offer on this database, I can see that the Virtual Poet of the future will be not so much a Virgilian guide in an underworld of texts as an up-to-the-minute Alexandrian scholiast in a library which can never burn down, scribbling in margins made up of gigabytes.

The fact is - although we remain almost unaware of it - there has been an almost unthinkable migration. Every poetry text imaginable, and some that are unimaginable, is now on the Chadwyck-Healey database.

Within the past few years, something remarkable has happened: in a silent and largely unrecorded way, language has removed itself from the eco-system of print and publication it has inhabited for nearly a thousand years, and has quietly, easily, unfussily established itself in this new one.

What does this mean for poetry?

To start with, there is the practical aspect. I am director of a distinguished Creative Writing Program at Stanford. The poetry workshop there retains a physical residence. The poets in the Stegner Fellowship workshop at Stanford bring their poems to a room and we look at the chosen texts. Outside the window is grass and concrete and tangible Californian distance. As poets have done for centuries, we make judgments by looking at books and pages and talking about the poems that are figured there.

In Ireland workshops happen in the same way. There is something age-old and commonsense about this. There is no such thing as teaching creative writing, but there is such a thing as a community of craft: this is how I learned to be a poet. It is how the poets in the room with me at Stanford are learning to be poets. The rooms change, the discussion shifts. In my lifetime, pubs and smoky coffee-shops have become classrooms; quarrels have modulated into arguments. But the process survives. And, I would have said until recently, is likely to survive unchanged for a good while yet.

There is something at once thrilling and heartbreaking about this huge, silent emigration of sestinas, sonnets, villanelles, narratives, elegies, pantoums, epics and lyrics.

Within the space of a few years, unrecorded, almost uncommented on, they have crept out of their habitats, have abandoned their provenance, and found their way into the shelter of a future their authors could never have dreamed of. And if poetry, all of a sudden, has to find a new way to talk about databases and memory addresses, this cuts both ways: deep in the silence of a new technology, cyberspace is filling up with beautiful sounds, with the perfect music of feeling, with the resonance of carefully chosen words.

But what of the consequences? Will the smoky coffee houses, which became classrooms, now vanish altogether and turn into cyber-workshops? Is there any chance that the old technical debates will give way to the ghostly passion of virtual argument?

Attractive as those questions are, they aren't the real ones. The real ones go something like this: How will we - in Ireland, in our teaching, in poetry itself - handle the pressure of these changes. Are we going to go for the current platitudes, derived from 19th-century Arnoldian mystique, and say that the Internet is clogged with wouldbe poets, which is what was once said of workshops also? Or are we going to face the bare truth that enormous, irreversible changes are taking place in our customary definitions of poetic transmission, tradition, storage and inheritance?

This year has seen the exciting development of the first creative writing course taught in an Irish university, in Trinity College Dublin. I have no doubt that UCD will follow soon. And then many other campuses. Young poets will enter those courses, anxious to learn, grateful for the chance of craft and community, fortunate to have the eloquent and dedicated writers and teachers who are there.

But behind those young poets, around them, everywhere they look, they will see the evidence of a revolution which will no longer leave their art untouched, which can influence or oppress. It would be an enormous pity if we did not use our unique literary inheritance in Ireland, with its old links to the 19th century, to add a humane perspective to the 21st.

The possibilities for using the retrieval and storage capabilities of the new technology are only a scratching of the surface. There are also the dimensions of publication and access: of a virtual technical community. The conversation is still unformed and the possibilities are immense.

To actively encourage the new creative writing workshops in the universities to enter and shape this conversation would seem to me a very rewarding combining of two new initiatives. But we need to begin now. We need to know that technology is only a nickname, that the real name of what is happening is the future.