August 20, 2009
A Facebook for poets? UW-connected Read Write Poem site is that and more
Poetry and technology aren’t usually thought of in relation to each other, but a new Web site with UW ties unites the two to create a “Facebook for poets.”
Read Write Poem (www.readwritepoem.org) is the result of a collaboration between a technology guy, Andre Tan; and a poet, Dana Guthrie Martin. The two met when both worked at UWTV. Tan still works there, while Guthrie Martin has moved on to a new job at the King County Library System. In 2005, as Guthrie Martin tells the story, she heard Tan talking about personal blogs and was intrigued.
“I wanted a blog, but I was so intimidated by the technology that I couldn’t do it,” Guthrie Martin said. “I kept going to Andre saying, ‘Help me make my blog,’ and finally he just made one for me, and that was it.”
Through her blog, Guthrie Martin connected with an online group called Blogging the Artist’s Way, which was working through the program designed by Julia Cameron in her book, The Artist’s Way. This program allowed Guthrie Martin to rediscover poetry, a medium she hadn’t written in for a number of years. By 2006, she’d co-launched a new blog called Poetry Thursday, the main purpose of which was to publish a weekly writing prompt for poets.
Poetry Thursday took off immediately, and within a year Guthrie Martin had gathered a core group of people who participated regularly, with Tan providing technical help when needed.
“These were all poets I didn’t know before I did the blog,” Guthrie Martin said. “I connected with them by doing this project.”
But Guthrie Martin and Tan wanted more. As social media sites proliferated on the Web, the two started talking about having forums, groups, profiles and more. Tan began looking for the tools to make such a site possible, even as he was developing a separate social networking site for researchers and academics (ResearchOne) to collaborate and share their work here at the UW.
Guthrie Martin, meanwhile, discovered National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, a group to encourage bloggers to write every day for a month, on Ning, a site that has social media built into it.
“It was exciting because people could go and create subgroups for areas of interest they had,” Guthrie Martin said. “I showed up, I was an early adopter, and there weren’t any poetry groups. So I created one.”
But the interface wasn’t all she’d hoped for, so she soon launched a version of Read Write Poem independent of Ning. That was in November of 2007. Then Tan found a suite of open source components called BuddyPress, which allowed him and Guthrie Martin to reinvent Read Write Poem from a simple blog running on the WordPress platform, to a fully-fledged independent social networking site and online magazine.
The new site launched three weeks ago, and already is drawing up to 2,000 unique visitors a day, and getting up to 10,000 page views per day.
“Poets are a traditionally non-technical group of people, and it’s an interesting challenge to set up something easy to use and transparent for that audience,” Tan said. “They don’t have to fight through the interface to use it, yet it provides them with a set of tools that allows them to interact and push their poetry in ways they normally wouldn’t.”
Read Write Poem is a membership site (membership is free), where members create profiles and can “friend” and write on each other’s Facebook “Wall”-like “wire.” It includes groups that simply share their work as well as those that do critiques. It has a group that does collaborative poetry and one that uses found words and phrases to create poems. And yes, there are still prompts — some by celebrities of the poetry world. Tan and Guthrie Martin say they already have plans to launch Internet radio shows featuring interviews with poets. And down the road, the site might even become a publisher of members’ work.
“What we want to really push is that this site isn’t only for published or advanced poets,” Tan said. “We want to attract all kinds of people, from those who are newly interested in poetry all the way up to well-known poets. We want it to be accessible to everybody.”
Guthrie Martin agrees. “So many poets I know are so concerned with MFAs and prizes and getting published, making their mark,” she said. “For me, having who you are as a poet live on isn’t about any particular poem you write or your body of work. It’s about how you inspire other people to be interested in poetry. It’s just lovely to see people engaged in open, honest, friendly, generous, brilliant discussions of poetry just because they love it that much.”
It’s all been a bit of a whirlwind adventure. “Awesome and frightening,” is how Guthrie Martin describes the site’s growth. “We started out saying it would be Facebook for poets as a joke, but now it’s really becoming that,” she said.
For Tan, Read Write Poem fits in with an interest in facilitating lifelong learning. Besides, he isn’t just the tech guy; he has a background in visual arts and earned an MFA in film and television production from the University of Southern California.
“I’m excited to contribute to a unique project that forwards the arts,” he said. “It’s just fascinating to watch people interact and create on the site. I’m happy I am able to help create a space where people can feed off each other’s creative energies.”
