PoetsUnlimited Wraps Up
Six Years of Poetry on Medium.
Thanks for all the visits, the reading and the contributed poetry. As of October 2019, PoetsUnlimited ceases to publish new work.
As I close the book on this long-running publication, you can read below for a bit of history on its origin and where it all ended up. Thanks to all!
History
In October 2013, when Medium was quite new, I composed a poem, Anonymous Residents of Everyhood on the platform, to see how it looked.
I liked the crisp, clean appearance, with lots of white space. It brought good attention to the words and handled the presentation of text and images together in an nice consistent way across a few format options.
The opportunity to create my own little publication on the platform sounded fun. In those days anyone on the platform could submit a piece to your newly-created publication without needing to explicitly join or be accepted.
Since the only poems I saw here were in publications that also featured many different kinds of writing (and mostly prose) I thought that making my publication poetry-only would be a unique niche upon which to focus, even if it might never grow much beyond a few participants. It was a nice way to connect with other poets who decided to share their work through my little plot of virtual real estate.
Success With a Unique Position
Over the past six years, the site had grown a lot. PoetsUnlimited quickly became the largest, most active, poetry-only publication on Medium.
As well as far as I could tell, it was also the only publication on any website that delivered a fresh batch of ten to thirty poems by diverse writers every single day (verified only by some vigorous internet searching). Other daily-poetry sites would do one or two from their archives, or the odd poet would seek to write a poem every day on their own blog or website. So it was a pretty unique position in the history of poetry on the web, I think.
Maxing out at 66,000 plus subscribers and about 1000 contributor poets we reached a lot of readers. I’ve heard pleasant words from many poets saying they got their feet wet with poetry through their publishing and interactions on PU — and that has been the biggest reward.
A key to engaging and keeping readers was crafting a set of ‘rules’ that kept the reading experience consistently just about the poetry. The Contributors Guidelines grew to avoid letting works become bios, tutorials, sales pitches or (yes, it happened) single-word pieces. But it was also important to me to let people draw readers to their other work, publications and sales sites.
The ‘one line only’ of post-poem text rule seemed to work well for that. Within the boundaries of broad poetic styles, without explainers or videos, the words were always the focus. Without restrictions on topic or approach, skill or experience, I think we had a great range of diversity, and I hope it brought enjoyment to both writers and readers.
I’ve also enjoyed that early contributors to PU have gone on to create their own poetry-only publications. There are lots of different ones with many familiar names involved as editor/publishers and contributors. Maybe a few were inspired by, or driven to think about what they’d do differently from, their experiences on PU.
One challenge on Medium is that publishing a new page of featured pieces for today’s issue removes all vestiges of yesterday’s issue. The poems remain in the stream, but get re-ordered by the poets’ creation dates. Short of scrolling back through thousands of pieces, it’s hard to re-read anything from earlier dates.
The 5Faves page was an attempt to highlight a few of the really striking pieces for further attention. That brought additional readers to a few notable poems monthly for about two years.
Bringing it to a Close
In the past year or so, with changes Medium made to monetize the platform, managing the free-to-read nature of the publication had became more onerous. I shifted from daily to twice a week for publishing. I’ve seen readers and writers start to move away from the platform. The Medium business never really embraced poets, nor made an effort to engage or support publishers, even with a successful publication like ours. We undoubtedly brought readers to their platform. One might have expected a bit of outreach and interest in making us happy.
To wrap up, I am bringing PoetsUnlimited to an end on this the first day of October, six years after the publication arose in October 2013. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey as much as I have. I wish you all the best on the poetry paths you choose in future.
Your faithful publisher,
Ross.
I’ll still be around, writing and reading. I sometimes ‘workshop’ my own pieces on my HelloPoetry feed (they’re a bit buggy lately), and I post inane non-poetry commentary on topics such as food, breadmaking, science and a smidge of politics on Twitter.
