Origins

[jjhunter]

Just as Dreamwidth itself is a code fork of Livejournal, poetree is an explicit code fork of its sister comm poetry. It borrowed poetry's basic format of a weekly Poetry Host and, at least initially, duplicated the other's explanation of what Hosting entailed. Given that poetry was and continues to be an superlative Dreamwidth community for poetry sharing, I knew from the start that poetree needed a clear answer to 'So why do we need another poetry comm?' Initially, the answer was very specific:

There's one type of poetry (besides song lyrics) poetry explicitly doesn't take, and that's the poetry written by the poster. Less explicitly, there is a bias toward poetry that has been published on paper as opposed to posted online or shared through other more unorthodox channels.

In other words, poetree was originally conceived as a version of poetry where poets could share their own poetry. The poetry discussion element that has become so central to poetree's identity today was literally an afterthought on the original signup post.

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Further Reading
* poetree's first Guest Host was David Kopaska-Merkel. You can browse David's posts via his comm author tag.
* poetree's first multi-Hosted themed week centered on Poetry Complements. Click the link to read its introduction post and find links to individual posts from that week, including On illustrating poetry by guest artist meeks.