A Final Inspiration From My Dear Departed Friend Spinny...

There has been a "golden era" of internet poetry that began with the early internet and is fading or morphing into something different as the web becomes more and more commercial and corporate.

In the early years of the mid-1990's, there was a sort of wild, "anything is possible" innocence and creativity in the online world. This definitively carried over into online poetry.

• Hundreds of writers around the world tried their hand at poetry and prose.
• Many poetry websites were born, flourished, and died through the intervening years.
• Many poets began writing online and then either drifted away from poetry or just died as we frail humans do.
• Whole cultures of poetry were formed and faded with writers from all over the world participating together, across international boundaries.
• Many poets had entire online archives of their work wiped out as commercial realities brought poetry sites to their financial doom.
• Some sites still remain active, with poets writing and commenting on each others' works.
• Other sites still remain but are inactive, poetic ghost towns in the once "wild, wild West" of online poetry.
• Political poetry sites came and went.
• Live poetry readings were increased and enlivened by online poets and online collaborative tools for scheduling.

There is a story here, and it is a good one. It is a story that deserves to be told and remembered, just as my dear friend Janine deserves to be read and remembered. She is a microcosm of contemporary poetic history, and a part of that greater history.

I believe that I must preserve as much of that as I can for the future.

I intend to gather what I can of contemporary global poetry's history, and turn it into a treasure that we can all share for as long as people love wordplay, both textual and spoken.

Dreams, lives, loves, anguishes, wishes, and hearts are wound all about this story. It is a very, very human story, and a unique one, from the time of the Internet's birth and youth.

Do not be surprised, poets, if I reach out to you to tell your tales and read your poems.

If anyone asks, I will tell them Spinny got me to do it.

Dan