Swimming with poets

We feel so lucky to have been blogging and writing poetry with each other and with a large community of poets for years.

We became acquainted in 2006 through the popular prompt site Poetry Thursday and, from 2007 to 2010, we were members of the creative team that produced Read Write Poem (RWP).

In March 2010, when it was announced that the poetry community would lose RWP, we created Big Tent Poetry, a new place on the Internet for poets to supplement their writing practices and motivate/support one another. The tent flaps opened in May 2010 on the heels of April poem-a-day madness. We traveled with the circus for a full year, had a wonderful time with prompts and read some really creative work by community members.

We have been happy to put effort into building and maintaining community, but we have realized that we need to redirect some of that time and energy and focus on writing for a while.

Oh, community is still a huge part of our poetry practice. It always will be. It just looks different right now.

Off and on while RWP was active, we participated in a small, web-based (though private) poetry collaborative. This isn’t meant to re-create or re-produce it. There are major differences. For one, this experiment is designed to be very public. However, since we will do some writing together, similarities will be inevitable. We are grateful to past experiences that have shown us some of the possibilities, and we are looking forward to new discoveries as we go along.