A Poets View

First, a little background on poetry.com which if you write poetry at all you have seen them advertised everywhere.

Poetry.com will have you believe that they have created their site as a way for poets to be published and share their work with the world.  What they don’t tell you is that they publish and accept anything and everything from everybody and then turn around and tell you that your poem will be published in a beautiful anthology of poetry of which you can buy at an affordable price and share it with your family and friends.  They charge you an exorbitant amount for the book, I think now it’s about $60.00 or so plus they will send you a certificate with your name on it and add a bio etc… for extra money. 

For the virgin poet, this seems wonderful because they just received an acceptance letter and even though they have to spend some money, they will get to see their work in print.  How do I know this?  Back in the day, over 35 years ago I was one of those virgin poets.  And, I’m sure many of you poets out there reading this had the same experience - and they are still doing this today.  Read my words carefully - They are a business, they make money off of writers and don’t care about you or your poem.  Look at it this way.  They are the ponzi scheme of poetry sites.  They grab hold of unsuspecting poets, take their money and line their pockets. Always remember this.  If you have to pay to get your poetry published in a magazine, book, website etc…You are not really published.  The same goes for contests.  Let me preface by saying this is my personal opinion on poetry contests.  If you have to pay an entry fee you are just contributing to the grand prize.  If you are the winner, great.  If not, you just gave your money to someone else.  In the 35 years I’ve been writing I have never paid any entry fees for contests and I have won many.  I won a trip to Hong Kong as a result of a poem I wrote and never paid a dime to enter the contest.

Another note on poetry.com, since they are a business, they are there to make a profit and as I said earlier do not care what is published on their website and have published and allowed contest entries of plagiarized poetry.  How do I know this? Unfortunately, first hand.  It happened to me, today.  I found out that poetry.com allowed a contest entry from someone using my poem which I had written months ago.  Which basically means they obviously never check to see whether or not the author is indeed the author of the poem submitted, which by the way can easily be done.  Can anything be done about this?  I don’t know.  I called them today and was told they could do nothing.  Of course that did not fly with me, hence this post.  And, I unfortunately am not the only victim here.  It happens all the time and not just with poetry.com.

The point of this post is to educate and warn writers and poets of what is out there and how some of these supposed writing websites work.  Just for your own curiosity here is the poetry..com site http://www.poetry.com

Do diligence is the lay of the land here. I’ll keep you all posted on the outcome.