5 Common Mistakes Poetry Bloggers Make

In yesterday's video blog, I spoke a little about Web Poetry Wednesdays, a new series I'll be starting here tomorrow. Over the last few days, I've been browsing a lot of poetry blogs to find the ten poems that I'll feature in tomorrow's post, and I've made a few observations – I think there's a few key mistakes that a lot of poetry bloggers are making with their blogs, so I thought I'd use today's post to mention a few of those mistakes and offer some suggestions for fixing them.

No About or Biography Page
If there's one thing I look for when I first visit a poet's blog, it's an About or Biography page, and it's really surprising how many poets don't include one. Your bio page is a place for readers to get a quick glimpse of who you are and where you're coming from. In fact, because poetry is such a personal medium, knowing things like the author's age or location helps me get a grasp on what their poetry is saying – I'd expect a different style from a 45 year old man from Portland than I would from a 16 year old girl from Baton Rouge.

Your bio page is also a great place to include details such as publication credits, reader testimonials, and an author photo. Those details aren't necessary, of course, but I think they lend a bit of professionalism to your website.

No Contact Options
While I was searching for poems for tomorrow's post, I came across the blog of a brilliant young poet. The site was built with Wordpress, which meant that each poem was an individual post, but for some reason, I couldn't find a permalink to the particular poem I wanted to feature. I decided to send the author a message to see if I could get the URL for the poem from them directly, but after looking around, I realized that they'd provided no such contact options – no email address, no Twitter or Facebook account, and even comments on the site were disabled. Since I couldn't link directly to the poem, and couldn't get in touch with the author, in the end, I decided not to include their site in tomorrow's post.

While you don't necessarily need a dedicated Contact Page like mine, it's always a good idea to provide some sort of contact options for readers – it can be as simple as an email address or a link to your Twitter account, but it gives readers the ability to get in touch with you. I get messages all the time through my contact page from people who want to ask questions, or even to offer publication opportunities – Jules Engel of Jezebel Press got in touch with me through my site's contact page after we were published beside each other in Four & Twenty, and that eventually led to her including one of my poems in a zine she showed at the Portland Zine Symposium.

Auto-Playing Music
I'm not sure why, but for some reason, a lot of poetry sites still seem to be clinging onto a “feature” that, thankfully, the rest of the Internet got rid of after the 90s. I'm talking about background music that starts playing as soon as the site loads. I came across two such sites while looking for poets to feature in tomorrow's post – the first had some sort of instrumental midi playing in the background, and while the author's poetry was the type of overly sentimental glurge that I probably wouldn't feature anyway, the music definitely turned me off.

The other blog actually had some really good poetry, but the author made the poor decision to include a MySpace-style audio player, and I found it difficult to concentrate on their poetry with bad pop music blaring out of my speakers – worse, I had to scroll down three quarters of the page before I was able to find the function to turn it off. That poet won't be featured either – one of the things to keep in mind about web poetry is that your words won't get read if you annoy the reader before they can get to them.

No Name
This relates slightly to the first two mistakes I mentioned, but I also came across a few poetry blogs where the author never really stated their name anywhere. While I don't believe you necessarily have to use your real name (Gabriel Gadfly is a pen name, after all), I do think you should have some sort of identity or moniker that readers can use to refer to you by. After all, if I tell a friend that I read a great poem the other day, I'd like to be able to answer them when they say “Oh yeah? Who wrote it?”

I do think the identity you choose to use should be somewhat unique. Here's an example. Let's say there's a poet who only goes by her first name, Laura, on her blog. If I read one of her poems and want to share it with someone, it's hard to answer “Who wrote it?” I can say that Laura wrote it, but how does that differentiate her from all the other poets named Laura? It doesn't.

Compare that to Irk, the name used by one of the authors of The Peacock King – although Irk is, arguably, a screen name, it's fairly unique, and she's done a good job of linking her work to that identity, to the point that people who haven't even read Peacock King know who you're talking about when you mention the name Irk. (Irk and her co-author, Char, dabble a bit in poetry, by the way – check out their NaPoWriMo work from last April.)

Pictures Between Stanza Breaks
Finally, this is more of a personal preference than anything, but I really hate it when a poet inserts pictures between the stanza breaks of a poem. While many poets include photos or images with their poetry, putting pictures between stanzas really breaks up the flow of the poem and makes it difficult to read – in fact, it makes it seem more like each stanza is meant to be an independent piece, rather than parts of a whole.

If you do want to include photos or images with your poems, I think they're better suited at the beginning or end of the poem, or even right-aligned so that your images sit beside the poem.

Check Back Tomorrow!
Don't forget to come back tomorrow to check out the first installment of Web Poetry Wednesday. In the meantime, why don't you go check out Wisteria, my latest poem?