poetree | Entries tagged with !admin: about poetree

alee_grrl

Back in March when

jjhunter and I (

alee_grrl) were looking at creating new features to encourage community participation we came up with two ideas. The first was the Sunday Picnic. The second was to do a weekly challenge post. In discussing the format and framing of the challenges we quickly realized we needed to have two different types of challenges as we wanted to encourage broader participation in the community and not everyone who is part of our community writes poetry. We wanted to be sure that we had some way of including the poetry enthusiasts in the fun.

Both of us really enjoy playing with words and building on existing metaphors. As

jjhunter explained in her earlier post about the interplay of art and the

poetree community, our community name was inspired by a sculpture of a tree made from a book of poetry. The title of the work is "poetree", which is both a play on the word 'poetry' and an elision of the words "poet's tree." The poet's tree is a wonderful image that has formed the roots of many of our community's features. When we were discussing creation of a weekly challenge we exchanged a lot of playful title ideas, but the one that we both really loved was "Climbing the Poet's Tree."
( Read more... )

jjhunter

poetree sprouted from a visual seed, itself a snapshot of a pun made art.

Paper sculpture of a 'poetree' left as an anonymous gift at the Scottish Poetry Library

Mysterious paper 'poetree' sculpture - photo by chrisdonia

What is a 'poetree'? It sounds like poetry, and looks like an elision of poet's tree. And in the case of the image above, it is a small, extraordinarily detailed paper sculpture of a tree lovingly crafted from strips of printed paper and mounted on a book. The anonymous artist who left it as a surprise gift at the Scottish Poetry Library a year and a half ago also left this message referencing the library's Twitter handle:

It started with your name @ByLeavesWeLive and became a tree… We know that a library is so much more than a building full of books… a book is so much more than pages full of words… This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas…

( Read more... )

poetree_admin

alee_grrl
jjhunter will have the art post up tonight.

As the

poetree community has grown and evolved from a place to share poetry to a full blown community of poetry enthusiasts

jjhunter and I (

alee_grrl) have looked for ways to encourage and develop participation and discussion. One of the issues that came up in our brainstorming sessions was the need for an informal day where community members could talk about poetry without needed to host a week or wait for one of the multi-hosted weeks to come around. We also realized it would be nice to have a place for community members to discuss *any* topic, including non-poetry related topics, as a way for us to get to know each other and foster the growing sense of community. One of the suggestions was to set aside a day for a routine post that encouraged discussion and sharing. Sundays seemed to be an ideal day. The title "Sunday Picnic" was a fun riff off of the

poetree name.

The Sunday Picnic premiered on March 18, 2012 and has become a weekly tradition.

Recently we decided to roll some of the weekly round-up features, namely the associated member posts and general poetry news, into the Sunday Picnic post. The weekly round-up were time consuming and not sustainable. Rolling those features into the Sunday Picnic threads makes them more sustainable and far less time consuming.

Join us every Sunday under the branches of the Poet's Tree for a lovely picnic where a smorgasbord of delights and friendly conversation are available.

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.

( Read more... )

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.

poetree_admin

POETREE is a Dreamwidth-based community for discussing and sharing poetry. Each week the admins select a host whose job it is to share at three or four poems and an optional meta post or question for the audience. While hosts are often poets sharing their own work, poems in the free domain or those posted with permission of the author are also welcome, and people who have never written poetry themselves have hosted wonderful themed weeks in the past.

If you are interested in hosting a week, feel free to leave a comment indicating your interest at the current signup post & to take a look at the Recommended Posting Format page. You do not have to be a Dreamwidth member in order to host a week, and non-Dreamwidth members can participate in discussion through OpenID or anonymous comments.

Roughly every third week one of the admins organizes a community themed week delving into a particular aspect of poetry or poetry culture. For more information about these and other themed weeks, please see the themed weeks master post.

===
Community Calendar

CURRENT WEEK: Semi-hiatus; regular posting will resume May, 2016

HOST(S): N/A

CURRENT CHALLENGES: TBA

NEXT COMMUNITY WEEK: TBA

" " TOPIC & SIGN-UP POST: TBA

PREVIOUS WEEKS/HOSTS: Themed Week & Poetry Host Introduction Posts

=

FEATURED POSTS:

On illustrating poetry
- meeks / artist Marika Purisima

Poetry Trick or Treat: Halloween Haiku
- various members of the community

On poetry, Judaism, and being (or not being) a "religious poet"
- rbarenblat / velveteen rabbi / Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

+ more

Last updated: 4/3/16 by jjhunter

jjhunter

I love

poetry. I love its variety, with poets spanning from contemporary to classic, languages from Medieval Icelandic to Jamaican Patois, themes and types and tastes as diverse as the number of people choosing them. I love that there are three times as many poems by Margaret Atwood posted there so far as by William Shakespeare. I love the quality of the selections, the care with which people choose them. It is, in my biased opinion, the best of its kind I've ever found.

So why do we need another poetry comm?

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.

Let's celebrate the poets here on Dreamwidth, on Livejournal, on blogs and in bathrooms and out and about in the world. Let's celebrate and share poetry that hasn't been published commercially, but maybe one day will be, or maybe never will be. I believe we can do so respectfully and ethically (see comm guidelines about licenses and permissions). To encourage posting of poems by a variety of poets, I ask that poets wait to share their own poetry until a week when they are named Poetry Host. Posters may post others' poetry at any time.

Signup post for being Poetry Host

(n.b. that the commitment is three, not five, poems, and that not all poems must be by same author; also, you do not have to be a poet to be Poetry Host)