Thinking of Curating a Calendar?

We’d love to have you onboard!

The Poetz event calendars are provided for free as a way to support local poetry communities throughout the United States. It’s a great way for poets to find readings, for audiences to find poets, and for poetry hosts to find each other.

How much work does it take to Curate a local calendar? After the initial setup, which can take a bit of time as all events are being entered as new, not too much. Maybe an hour a week? And the returns that Curators receive in the form of goodwill and gratitude are immense. Consistency is important — getting  listings entered promptly, taking defunct series off the calendar, changing venue information when necessary, spelling the feature’s name correctly — but not particularly strenuous.

The guidelines are simple:

1. Regional calendars serve all poetic events in a given area, and are not limited according to venue or type of reading.  Curators use their own judgment in selecting which events to highlight (or not!), but apart from this all readings are treated equally.
2. Ideally, listings are posted within a week of receipt.
3. While Poetz promotes the calendars on this site, it’s up to the Curator to let their poetic community know about it and actively seek out local listings during the startup period.
4. A yourtown@poetz.com email address is established up for each calendar, which forwards incoming listings to the Curator. It’s best not to use a private email address to receive listings for two reasons: One, spam. Two, if the calendar changes hands, or the Curator changes email providers, the address for listings doesn’t have to change as well, messages are just rerouted appropriately.

That’s the whole story!

How does it work? Visit the Test Drive calendar to get a feel for what the software (Calcium) is like. Add some events, modify them, delete them. A manual is available for those who care to read such things.

Want to give it a shot? Just give me a holler!