Guest post: The State of Online Poetry

If I had to pick a single website that undermined and damaged the state of poetry on the web, it’d have to be Poetry.com. Poetry.com was the website of an organization known as the International Library of Poetry, aka the International Library of Poets, aka the International Poetry Hall of Fame, a Maryland-based company that ran so-called poetry contests. (The domain name has since been bought by Lulu.com, who has, supposedly, tried to steer the site away from its nefarious origins.)

Because they were able to claim one of the absolute best domain name for a poetry website, Poetry.com had phenomenal reach. If you were at all interested in writing poetry, you probably looked at the site at least once. The site offered you the chance to submit your poetry for the chance to see it published, and what’s more, you could be entered in a poetry contest to win thousands of dollars.

If your poem was selected, you got a fancy letter in the mail telling you how your poem was chosen out of all the other thousands of submissions to appear in the International Book of Poetry’s latest anthology, which you could purchase from them for $59.99 plus shipping and handling.

Did you catch that? The International Library of Poetry took your poem, printed it in a book, and then asked you to pay them to receive a copy of it. If you know anything about publishing, you know that authors, even if they aren’t being paid for their work, are almost always able to receive free copies of the work their content appears in. Worse, you paid for the biggest waste of paper ever made: 8-16 poems crammed onto every page, with no author bio (you could buy a bio spot in the back of the book, but it’d cost you an extra $25), written in a tiny Times New Roman-esque font.

Poetry.com banked on the fact that aspiring writers, desperate for validation, would pay good money to see their work in print and have something to take home to Momma. But hey, your poem was chosen out of thousands of submissions, right? That must mean it was good, right? Err… not so much.

You see, here’s the sinister thing: every poem, no matter how atrociously bad, was accepted. It didn’t matter if you misspelled words, threw grammar out the window, or wrote in chatspeak: every one of the thousands of submissions was… err… chosen out of all the other thousands of submissions for publication. In fact, once people started catching on, some writers even started submitting the worst crap they could come up, even poems that blatantly criticized the ILP, just to see if they could actually get a rejection. To my knowledge, every poem was still accepted. You can read more about the site and their methods of business here.

Makes sense, if you think about it. Your company sells overpriced anthology books to poets desperate for praise. Every writer you put in print is another potential customer, so you print everybody, no matter their quality, and you make a ton of money.

Unfortunately, it worked. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of aspiring writers — many of them with little to no skill at actually writing poetry — bought into it, and I think it gave a lot of them overinflated egos. I can’t count the times I’ve had the following conversation:

Person I’ve Just Met: So what do you do?
Me: Well, I’m a poet.
PIJM: Me too. You know, I’m published.
Me: You submitted a poem to Poetry.com, got accepted, and they printed your book in their latest anthology, right?
PIJM: Yeah, pretty cool, huh? They inducted me into the Poetry Hall of Fame, too.
Me: Imagine that.

How does this play into the larger scheme of web poetry? When blogging became a craze, oodles of poetry blogs popped up, chock full of works written by amateur poets. People had been publishing poetry on the web long before blogs, of course, but blogs made it easy for anyone to do it with little to no knowledge of web design, and they provided user feedback through comments right out of the box.

I’ll admit that I had one of these blogs myself. I was still a teenager at the time, and I ran a blog called Clockwork Decadence, with a sickly green-text-on-black color scheme and enough bad emo poetry to fill three black (and they had to be black, duh) notebooks. It was the first time I’d put my poetry online, and the first time I’d ever received feedback from readers. Now, the spectrum of user comments on poetry blogs typically swings overwhelming towards the positive, but every once in a while, I’d get a scathing comment from a reader who sounded like they knew what they were talking about. They’d comment on the angsty, meaningless topics I’d chosen to write about, the poor word choices, the misguided rhythms, the crippling rhymes, and a whole lot more.

In my opinion, scathing (but constructive) criticism and repeated rejection are key to pushing out of the pupa phase of bad highschool poetry. If you’re serious about poetry, you eventually get sick of people telling you that your poetry sucks, and you make it not suck so much.

Unfortunately, I think the absurd amount of flattery showered on poets by the ILP made a lot of them impervious to criticism. You see, it’s hard to tell someone their poetry is a horrendous steaming pile of crap when they proudly boast that they’ve “been inducted into the International Poetry Hall of Fame”. They have a tendency to not believe you.

There’s one fellow I’ve been following for about six years — I won’t link him, since I don’t think he deserves the attention — that has that mentality. In six years of publishing poetry on his blog, receiving dozens of good constructive critiques on his work from talented people who know what they’re talking about, he hasn’t improved or evolved in the slightest. His work from six years ago sounds exactly like the stuff he’s writing today. He’s still proud of his “achievements” with the ILP.

That’s not to say that every poet published by Poetry.com was a bad poet. In fact, one could argue that the International Library of Poetry provided the impetus that helped a lot of talented, if unpolished, poets get serious about their work, especially the ones that decided to do their homework and figure out how the publishing industry really works. If you can get your hands on an old copy of one of their books, you can actually find a number of gems, if you’re willing to thumb through the roughly 1000+ poems published in every book.

There will always be companies like ILP that prey on aspiring writers, but hopefully there won’t be another one that will have the reach and impact that Poetry.com had; today’s Internet allows for much faster spread of information, exposing unscrupulous publishing tactics for what they are before people get suckered in.

The good news is that things are getting better for online poetry. More and more serious poetry journals, even ones that have been in print for decades, are offering digital versions or even going online-only. Because of that, I think poets have an advantage over fiction writers, in that there’s not quite as much of a stigma against web publishing for us. In fact, one could even argue that poetry is the first form of creative writing where it’s actually expected and encouraged that a writer’s early works will appear on the Web before they ever get picked up for a dead-tree book deal.

Poetry lends itself well to the Internet, in that it consists of bite-size, standalone content that’s easily shared through social media sites like Facebook and StumbleUpon. It can easily be converted into non-text formats like audio and video, and it doesn’t require the time commitment of a long novel.

Poetry has long been looking for something to help it get back on its feet. It’s my opinion that the Internet is that something.