The World Drops By Poets Online

I enjoy looking at the widget on this page that let's you see the recent visitors to the blog and see that fans of poetry from around the world are visiting.

Although doing the PoetsOnline.org website since 1998 and this blog since 2005 has connected me to many poets, I have not literally met very many of them.

A few of the poets who submit poems and some of the featured poets are people I know from workshops and readings from the east coast of the United States.

I do feel like I know some of the regular contributors too. I have been reading their poems for years and have seen their writing change and grow. But, I will probably never meet them in person.

In this age of Facebook and social media "friends," I have a pretty wide circle of poetry friends. People follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest.

One of those virtual poetry friends is Mary Kendall who has been submitting poems for the past eight years. I know that she has been a familiar name in the submissions folder, but I know more about her because she has emailed me about "non-submission" topics, and because via those social networks, I discovered her own blog.

Mary is an American transplanted to London. She started blogging in 2012 when she was headed to the UK "for four months" but she is still there and I get to follow her European travels through her blog.

from Mary's visit to Monet's gardens and house at Giverney

She visited a place I have on my bucket list - Monet's gardens and home at Giverney.was

But the post that I enjoyed the most was one about her own poetry and Poets Online story. Those are the stories that I hope are out there, but I don't expect to hear.

Here is an excerpt:

In 2005 I discovered a website that I quickly grew to love: POETSONLINE (www.poetsonline.org). It is a website with an accompanying blog that never fails to interest me (the blog can be reached through the main website). I am very indebted to this site and blog. After a 20 year hiatus in writing, I slowly started writing again in 2001. It was a strange experience (to be saved for another time) to start writing once again after so long. So, how did this site and blog help? This site presents a poem as a prompt (often several poems) along with some carefully constructed thoughts about the works. This leads the editor of the site, Ken Ronkowitz, to present that month's prompt idea. The prompts are varied and always interesting. The blog adds many details and comments. I often write in response but don't send the poems in. This past month I spent days writing a poem about a willow tree to send in, but when the deadline came, I knew the poem wasn't ready. It is now, but it is relegated to my quiet folder of poems not shared with the world. Who knows where it will land. When I read the poems then published to the prompt, I realized mine was quite different and perhaps it was a good thing I didn't submit it after all. We writers are our best self-critics, aren't we?

Anyhow, starting in 2005, I've submitted and published a number of poems, some ok, some good, and one or two that have become some of my favorites. Occasionally I will get an email from someone who has read a poem and they make a private comment to me. Once, a composer, Paul Carey, asked to use some winter haiku he had read from the site. That was a lovely surprise. I never got to hear the resulting work, which was my only disappointment, yet the fact that another person wanted my words for his music is touching. 

My thoughts today made me think back to the first poem I wrote for poets online seven years ago. The prompt asked us to think about who our reader is and what they would be like, how they would read the poem, how they might respond. I'm going to share this poem with you here today because I have been wondering who my readers are in all I have ever written. They will always be anonymous just as I am a reader of poems, novels, blogs, etc. and unknown to so many authors, many of whom I love.

It's a nice bit of serendipity that her first submission was to a prompt about the reader you imagine when you write. I have several idealized readers for my poems. One is a radio voice - that of Michael Silverblatt. For some poems, I have a single person that I am writing to and for.  But for most of the poems I have written based on my own prompts, I imagine the poets like Mary who are out there also writing a poem to that prompt. I imagine that, like them, I want the other poets reading the poems that are in the Poets Online archive (and that's a lot of poems at this point) to like my poem.

Sometimes poets and readers will reach out by email, as Mary mentions, and connect because of a poem online. Most of the time that doesn't happen. Most of the posts here don't get comments. That is typical for most blogs and websites. I have been teaching for more than 35 years, so I know that most students won't tell you about a good experience they had in your class, but you do cherish the few that do.

Writing poetry can be a lonely craft. Doing the Poets Online site is also a quite solitary job. But when I do hear from poets, it makes it worth it.

Looking Back at Poets Online

Today's post is a cross-posting from a guest post I did on Author Amok. That's the blog by my friend, the poet and teacher, Laura Shovan. Poets often do guest posts on other blogs during National Poetry Month, so I wrote a little history of Poets Online.

POETS ONLINE (the site, not this blog) started in 1998 as an e-mail exchange amongst four poets. At a writing workshop that summer, I asked three other poets if they wanted to continue exchanging poems by email beyond the workshop. After a few weeks, we decided to take turns suggesting a writing prompt idea. In that first iteration, we gave ourselves a week and then e-mailed our poems to each other.

As more poet friends of the group wanted to join in, it became awkward using email. So, I created a website where the poems could be posted and I became the person who received the poems from participants. I titled the site Poets Online.

The idea of poets being online in 1998 was very new. The site grew in number only by word-of-mouth and poets who stumbled upon it in a web search.

The one week deadline proved to be too short for most people and too much compiling for me, so we moved to once a month.

In early 1999, I added a mailing list to remind people to check on the latest prompt and poems. The list still exists and now has over 500 "subscribers."

The site was originally located on a free web server service (Geocities), but when I was told in 2001 that "Your web pages have exceeded your account's total data transferred quota," I knew that popularity was forcing me to rebuild the site elsewhere.

I bought the domain poetsonline.org and redid the site and it has continued to grow for these fifteen years.

The intent has always been to provide inspiration through a writing prompt that remains open for about a month. Poets can try the prompt and submit that poem for possible online publication. I've had emails from lots of people who try the prompts but don't want their poems online.  A number of teachers from elementary level through college have told me they use the archive of prompts (more than 200) with their students and use the poems archived online as models.
 
The site has remained pretty much a one-man operation with me doing all the web work and just asking a few poet friends to read through the submissions.

We try to accept as many poems that respond to the current prompt in a serious way as space allows. We realize that we receive poems from poets of varying ages and experience. We receive poems every month that "appear" to be written by young people, but if they address the prompt in an interesting way, they have a good chance of being posted.

It has been very encouraging to receive mail from poets around the world saying that this was their first publication or letting me know that their poem in is a print journal or even that their first book has been published. I know of at least a dozen poets who submitted in years past that now have more than one book out in the world.

This, like many poetry efforts, is certainly a non-profit operation. We include Amazon links to books and poets featured and if in a year the referral fees from that cancel out the cost of the domain and online hosting, it has been a good year.

For anyone submitting poems to Poets Online or any other publication on or offline, a few rules apply. First, read some of the poems they have published recently and see if your poem fits the selections. This especially applies to most print journals. Haiku have a much better chance in a haiku journal (or for one of our haiku prompts).

Second, read the submission guidelines. Every publication has something like our submissions page which gives you information about formatting, deadlines and genre preferences. We only want to receive one poem in response to the current prompt. When a group of 8 arrive, none will be read. 

Third, know your rights. Some journals purchase the first rights to your work and some retain further rights for republication. Can your work appear in other places simultaneously? How long do they retain those rights? Our page on copyright is a good start in your author education. PoetsOnline.org  retains first electronic rights at time of publication, after which all rights revert back to the author.

A fourth rule applies very much to Poets Online. In the fifteen years of offering prompts and reading poems, we have rejected more poems than we have accepted for one reason. They don't address the prompt.  No matter what the prompt says, there are always submissions that have nothing to do with it.

Many of the poems that are off-prompt are ones I would consider for publication if we just accepted poems on any topic or in any form. Love poems, religious and political poetry comes in every month even if the prompt was for poems about opposition or a call for odes or for poems about where we find our inspiration. 

Unfortunately, we can not respond personally to every poem submitted, acknowledge every submission except for an auto-response, or offer critiques of your work. Subscribing to our mailing list will notify you of when new poems appear.

Which doesn't mean that I never correspond with poets who submit. You have the option to have your name linked to an email address or your own website and a number of poets have connected via the site. Occasionally, I will email poets with some encouraging rejection note. (Yes, there is a such a thing. I have received them myself.) Sometimes we suspect that it is a young poet in age or experience. Rejection is tough on poets.

We added this blog in 2005 so that we could continue the poetic conversations all month and expand upon the prompts. It also allows you to comment on the poems and prompts.

And Poets Online went social early on when Facebook first allowed groups to have pages. We have an official page on Facebook and also a group page where anyone can post and comment on poems, prompts or things poetic.

We also have a Twitter feed @poetsonline for daily bursts of poetry news, a Pinterest site for things visual, a GoodReads page to share what we are reading and we publish a Poet & Writer Evening News online daily.

You still have time to submit to our April prompt on the prose poem which features poems by Louis Jenkins and Jim Harrison.  The current prompt is always the one open for your submissions, but there are plenty in the archive to keep you busy.