by Dana Guthrie Martin, director and founder

Thank you all for the kind words the past few days about the work the volunteer administrative and creative staffs did here at Read Write Poem. More importantly, thank you all, the membership — not for being here per se — but rather for making a life of, inside of and with poetry.

This site was always meant to bring people together in scholarship, creativity and conversation. It was meant to encourage people to read, write, discuss and share poetry — both their own and those written by other poets. According to these measures, the site has been a success, as evidenced by how many people have come here, and found something here, and stayed here. Namely, members have found one another and an internal sense of loving poetry, resonating with poetry, and being a poet.

This realization — of an identity one wants to embrace and a way one wants to live — is not something any site can ultimately bestow. The ability to realize this identity in your own lives is within all of you and always has been. Read Write Poem merely facilitated that to some degree. Perhaps it took you out of isolation or gave you access to poetry-related information you would not have had access to otherwise. Or perhaps it was just plain fun.

There will always be community where poetry and poets are concerned — whether it is the formal community of a master of fine arts program, the online community of a poetry site, the communities we make in our own neighborhoods and regions, or the real and virtual community that arises as those with like interests find one another through informal means.

Other online poetry communities are already reaching out to this membership, taking root. Many excellent creative ideas are exploring the breadth and depth of all they can be to their memberships. It is exciting to watch the varied paths of those communities as they unfold.

The loss of Read Write Poem is a significant loss, no doubt. It is a loss all of us, including me, are experiencing in an overwhelming way. But within you is what was always within you: the ability to be a poet, to reach out to other poets, to share, to write, to live in and move through the world as a poet.

Dana Guthrie Martin founded Read Write Poem in 2007 as an extension of her work as co-founder of the Poetry Thursday site. She writes poetry and prose, and lives in the Seattle area with her husband, her robot and her two hermit crabs.

by the Read Write Poem Staff

• Review the guidelines for inclusion in the anthology. Submit work if and only if you meet every requirement listed. Read the requirements carefully.
• Send your self-selected top three poems in the body of an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
• Include “anthology submission” in the subject line for your email.
• Include your full name, as well as either your Read Write Poem member name if you are a member, or the name under which you have been posting links to your work on the Read Write Poem site each day in April.
• Indicate what name you want your work published under. Some people use their real names and others use pseudonyms. We need to know which you want to appear in the anthology.
• Include the blog or site where your poems appeared each day in the month of April. If you posted the work in its entirety on the Read Write Poem site, let us know that’s the case. Note: If you have removed your work from your site, we cannot verify that you posted it on the appropriate days. This could affect your inclusion in the anthology. We will contact you if such a situation arises.
• If any of your three submitted pieces are in response to the prompts shared on the Read Write Poem site during the month of April, indicate which prompt the poem or poems are written to.
• If you have any other information to relay — such as letting us know you are in a distant time zone and you want us to be aware of the system you used for timing your posts in relation to our U.S. time zones — please add that information in the body of your email.
• Do not use your Read Write Poem private messaging account to contact us. We need to have an email address that will be valid after May 1. We will be communicating with you about the poem we select from your submission, as well as to share galleys with you for approval before the publication goes live.
• Send work no later than May 7.
• If you have any questions, we will field them by email. Send questions to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org with “anthology query” in the subject line.