Welcome to the Second Life of Poetz

Poetz was founded in 1999, mostly as a way of letting local writers know about upcoming features at a new reading series at the Pink Pony Cafe on Ludlow Street.

Both the site and the series were modest ventures, very casually launched. The reading was meant to fill the gap left when The Knitting Factory (then on Leonard Street) decided they couldn’t spare the AlterKnit — a little downstairs room where Yictove hosted a wonderful open mic on Friday nights — for poets any longer. Yictove, who lived in Jersey, was weary after ten years of venue-bouncing and chose to hang up his spurs rather than seek another space. But we regulars weren’t ready to let go our little community, and so the reading at Pink Pony was born. That first November night we had no microphone, no feature, two hosts and only five readers at the open. No time limits, we went twice around the list and still ended early.

The NYC Poetry Calendar was in decline around that time, and after a year of sporadic appearances and overlooked listings, it finally faded away altogether. Into the void, creating a void.

So Poetz came to be. At first it was a single page, hardly more than an electronic flyer listing upcoming events at The Pink Pony. Then a few poems written by featured and — we felt — underrepresented poets out of our slowly-growing cadre of regulars (Pete Dolack, Iris Schwartz, Meagan Brothers, John Proctor, Miriam Stanley, Ice, Jennifer You, Robert Parody…too many to list and certainly more than I can remember). Then other hosts — I believe Su Polo of Saturn Series was the first — asked whether Poetz could list their reading schedules as well. One thing led to another, and in 2002 Poetz got some fancy software from Brown Bear and “The Ultimate Online NYC Poetry Calendar” became a central component of the site.

As of this writing there are close to 500 poets — and well over 1500 poems — in residence here. Along with NYC, Poetz hosts calendars for Hudson Valley, Long Island, Connecticut, Pittsburgh and Vermont. Over the years, calendars for New Jersey, Boston, Florida and New Mexico have risen and flourished for a time. Colorado and Vancouver calendars are on the roadmap.

Now it’s a blog? Yes and no. In early March, Poetz’ (now-former) webhost performed an upgrade that killed all the calendars. Yes, the underlying software was a bit dated, but a smidgen of diligence on their part would have given me an opportunity to upgrade before all hell broke loose. When hell did break loose, that hosting company pretty much flipped me the bird.

Try to fix it? Or just take the outage as a sign that it was time to let the whole thing go? Apart from the calendars, Poetz had lain fallow for a few years, rarely publishing new work. In fact, in all of 2007 no new poems appeared at all. Calling it quits altogether was a pretty tempting option at first, because one thing was clear: fixing what was broken wasn’t going to be enough; the whole site was screaming for a makeover. A new infrastructure to replace the pathetically outmoded MS FrontPage (do NOT laugh!) on which it had been built and on which, in the joyful spirit of entropy, it had remained.

Two months of very hard nerd-work and several hundred bucks later, the results are as you see them. A spiffy new WordPress front-end, updated and expanded calendar functions, simpler navigation and a lot more stuff. New poems from some very gifted writers. Essays on hosting and stagecraft. Soon, reviews. Perhaps automated calendar updates. If there’s something special that you’d like to see here, please let me know. Now that the site has been dragged, with all requisite kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, the possibilities are (as my email tagline has declared for years) HUGE.

Welcome to the second life of Poetz. I hope you all enjoy your stay.