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.
