poetry

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Poetry is a writing form that can be found on many personal websites. In addition to traditional written form, one can add additional formatting or multimedia elements (photos, audio, video, CSS, etc.) to supplement their meaning.

IndieWeb could be a great place for poets to publish in a way that they are in control.— Jacky Alciné at IndieWebSummit 2018

How to

Most poets put their poetry on their sites in basic text with some HTML and CSS. There are currently no custom post types or markup for posting poetry, so some may designate it as an article or a simple note. Examples and brainstorming are welcome below.

IndieWeb Examples

Greg McVerry

Greg McVerry used IndieWeb Camps to build a poetry Building a Poetry Page which was finished and demoed at a later camp Poetry Page

100 Poems in 100 Days

2020: Greg McVerry did a poetry microcast of one poem every day. PoemBox a Boombox of Bad Poems Hundredth poem published on 2020-07-08

30 Days of Webmention poetry

30 Days of collaborative webmention poetry. Greg McVerry and Dogtrax wrote a collaborative poem using webmention. Each day one of the pairs, usually both, would add to the poem by writing a new poem. untitled poem.

The Daily Connector

The Daily Connector experimented with IndieWeb poetry and syndicating to IndieWeb.xyz: https://dailyconnector.com/2018/10/10/testing-out-indieweb-with-poetry/

Maxwell Joslyn

Maxwell Joslyn has a poems index which he plans to convert into a collection by giving each poem its own permalink
poems are ordered non-chronologically; if he turns his poetry page into a feed, he would like that order to be respected in indie readers
Following discussion at 2020/Online/collections he converted his poems page into a collection. Upgrades to his site's build script, JS, HTML, and CSS were involved. Explanatory blog post here.

capjamesg

capjamesg publishes poetry on his website in a Poetry category.
Poems are displayed using a minimal web page design so there are fewer distractions when reading the poem.
Example monostich poem: https://jamesg.blog/2024/06/10/rest/
Example poem with multiple stanzas: https://jamesg.blog/2024/04/04/web-we-weave/

Other Examples

Kevin Marks describes how to use Google browser and search functionality to highlight found text in web pages to create a form of erasure/blackout poetry on the web at https://highlightpoetry.com/. One can place links on their own web pages that point to other's pages with the highlights shown. In an ideal IndieWeb world, one may wish to archive such pages or do screengrabs of the content to ensure disappearance of the page doesn't result in linkrot or actual erasure of one's erasure poem.

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey in the New Yorker on 2023-07-24 archive copy
- Provides an interesting UI example of a blackout poem in which the white text on a black background appears solid upon first view, but as one scrolls down the primary text dims to greay and the revealed poem remains bright white. (Compare with Kevin Marks example of highlight poetry.)

Discovery

Main article: discovery

Like most writing online, most authors want their work to be read. Toward improving the idea of discovery, the following are some IndieWeb ways for having one's poetry found:

IndieWeb.xyz

Indieweb.xyz has several stubs that one can Webmention to aggregate and share their poetry with others via syndication.
- https://indieweb.xyz/en/poetry
- https://indieweb.xyz/en/indiewebpoetry

CLMOOC

CLMOOC
- built by Greg McVerry using the Inoreader RSS reader and then creating an iframe on a WordPress site
- used to collect poetry, art, music and musings such A Found Feldgang Poem
- Includes a web ring using a WordPress plugin.

Poetry Friday

Poetry Friday: At the end of the week many children’s book aficionados and bloggers use their sites to contribute favorite poems or chat about something poetical in an event called Poetry Friday. The features can be for children or adults, can be original poems, reviews of poetry books, reviews of poetic picture books, links to poems at copyright protected sites, thoughts about poetry, and more. Song lyrics have been even been featured.

Camp Sessions

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