Supposing I write a funny poem about how stupid some of my co-workers are at work (pretend for the sake of argument it really is funny). Maybe I throw in a few poems about political figures or whatnot.
I would then want others to see it, but walking around with it at work and doing poetry readings in the breakroom during lunch, probably not a good career move.
So how can I publish these? I don’t mean paper books or to sell anything and live as a poet, but get them out there to be read on the internet or whatever.
Would a blog thing be anonymous? Would I have to use my own website from my main internet account? Would anyone even notice it? Could I do poetry readings at a local place where they let you do poetry readings? Do such places exist?
I don’t know if you’ve ever identified yourself in any of your posts here, but if not, you could just post them right in this thread. Or you could get a blog, or countless other methods. Whether anyone else sees it, well, it’s impossible to make any guarantees there.
There’s the trick - the balance between maintaining your anonimity and getting readers. The more you link to it from here, from Facebook, MySpace, etc., the more the people to whom you recommend it will begin to suspect it’s really you. Yes, you can set your blog up to be quite anonymous, but keeping it anonymous is the trick.
Other than that, there are a lot of places out there - blogs, e-zines, message boards for ‘publication’, open mike nights, coffee shops, YouTube, SoundClick, speakers’ corners for reading. Cook up some disguise for video so that people can’t see your face, and you’re away.
Specific to the SDMB, have you thought of one of the Poetry Sweatshops or Teemings e-magazine?
You can submit a poem to poetry.com. They have a “poetry contest” – really a scam to get you to buy books with your own poetry.
But, they allow anyone to put up a submission, using any name, and it’s searchable, or you can put something up and can point people to it (like this one, the worst poem I could come up with in five minutes).
In general, though, your co-workers are not likely to find a poem on the Internet, anyway.
If they are any good, the best thing to do would be to submit them to poetry journals. You would be able to put any fake name on them you wished.
If they weren’t of that caliber (and honestly, I’ve seen some pretty bad poems in journals), you can definitely do an anonymous blog. Wordpress or blogspot are both simple to set up anonymously.
But a random blog won’t have many readers. There’s no reason for anyone to happen across it.
The state of contemporary poetry is pretty damned awesome. And both have standards. If your work sucks, you can probably still get it published, but the only people who will read it are the other people in that journal–whose work probably also sucks.
Anyway, by state of contemporary poetry, I meant the state of the the number of paying readers (peopel buying poetry books) . . . not the quality of the living poets