WHERE WE CAME FROM
POETS ONLINE started in the summer of 1998 as an e-mail exchange amongst four poets. Taking turns and suggesting a prompt idea, we took a week and then e-mailed our poems to each other. As more poets joined the group, it became an awkward mailing process and I took on the task of creating a web site to post responses & prompts - and POETS ONLINE was created.

By early 1999, a mailing list was created to remind people to check the latest prompt & poems and that has led to several hundred subscribers.

But, fame has its price - we received the following message from Mindspring (the company that hosted the original POETS ONLINE web pages) in November 1999:   "Your web pages have exceeded your account's 'total data transferred' (bandwidth) quota for current calendar month and have been taken off-line. Whenever someone visits your web page, they transfer data from MindSpring's web server to the visiting browser and yada, yada, yada... In other words, too many people were visiting the site.

POETS ONLINE is a small, not-for-profit operation. So, the easiest course of action was to transfer the site to a "free" server (GeoCities) which required taking their pop-up ads AND meant that the many search engines that had listed the site and other sites that had linked to us wouldn't find the site. That held us over for more than 2 years.

In 2003, I bought the domain poetsonline.org and you can currently access the site from there. The original URL was on a Geocities free server which now is simply a redirect to the new address. The site is mirrored on my personal space at NJIT, but if you are linking to our site from your own web page, please use http://poetsonline.org

WHAT WE TRY TO DO
On the site we try to accept as many poems that respond to the current prompt in a serious way as space allows. Poems are generally read by myself and several readers and approved by simple consensus. We realize that we receive poems from poets of varying ages and experience. The site continues to be a showcase for new work and a place to go for inspiration online. We are gratified by the number of teachers and students who have written us to say that they find the site useful for their writing. We are gratified that more than 70 other sites link to us.

The site is not intended as an online workshop but many poets who have poems posted along with their e-mail address have reported that they receive comments on their poems. Some report a regular correspondence with other poets from the site.

Support...

You can support the site simply by using the links to Google Ads, Amazon or CafePress found on site pages.
Thanks for dropping by the site. We hope you'll read the poems, try the writing prompts and perhaps submit your work to us.