Lulu Poetry

» see poetry.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

English-language amateur poetry, sold back to the people who wrote it, is about as far from my corner of the internet as a website gets. I was in Turkey and in engineering, and the apparatus here runs on a very American transaction: a stranger tells you your poem has been selected, and the selection turns out to cost money. I came to this one entirely through the archive and the court of public complaint, which in this case is a thick file.

Lulu Poetry was what Lulu.com called Poetry.com after buying it on 7 March 2009. Lulu was the print-on-demand company, so the logic was visible from orbit: acquire several million people who have written something and would quite like to hold it as a book. The site it bought had been collecting submissions online since 1997 and the pile it came with was enormous. The closing notice claims over 14 million poems from more than 7 million poets, and the sequential poem IDs on the live site ran to 14,712,220, so the number is roughly real.

On 13 April 2011 Lulu announced that the site would close on 4 May. The notice was addressed to "Dear Poets" and called the two preceding years a privilege, with a line about the $35,000 in prizes awarded over that stretch. Then it told everybody to copy and paste their own poems onto their own computers, because "we will be unable to save any customer information or poetry as of this date". It then offered to sell them a poetry book on Lulu.com with the same login. As of midnight Eastern on 4 May the site stopped answering and the 14 million poems were gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what Poetry.com was before Lulu ~

The business Lulu bought was founded in 1983 as Watermark Press and traded under a grander name, the International Library of Poetry. The model was old before the web arrived. Submit a poem to a free contest, receive a letter saying your work has been selected for an anthology, and then find that entrants had to buy at least one copy of that anthology for the poem to actually appear in it. Nobody was rejected, because the founders said plainly that they were not in the business of sending rejection slips. Poets were quoted up to $1,500 to get a collection into print, with extras for a biography line and for membership of a society.

The output was industrial. Between 1996 and 2001 the operation put out more than 250 anthologies, each one carrying over 1,500 poems, which works out to a volume of hardbacks that nobody was ever meant to read cover to cover. The Library of Congress, which keeps a research guide to this whole genre, calls the International Library of Poetry the best-known publisher of vanity poetry anthologies between 1988 and 2009. By 2001 the Better Business Bureau in Maryland was holding close to 400 complaints about it. When poetry.com started taking submissions over the web in 1997 it did not change the model, it only removed the cost of soliciting.

~ twenty-one days ~

Three weeks is not long to copy 14 million documents off somebody else's server, and Archive Team spent most of that window fighting the server rather than reading it. The URL structure was the one piece of luck: poem pages were keyed on a number and ignored the text slug in front of it, so you could request any ID with any nonsense in the path and get the poem back. Volunteers claimed numeric ranges on a wiki table, pointed wget at them, and started filling in a progress column.

The progress column is a record of losing. Entry after entry reads "IP banned", and one volunteer wrote "IP blocked (yes, all of them)". The person who claimed the first million IDs got about 0.7% of them. The site also had a failure mode that quietly poisoned the download: under load it would 302 to unavailable.poetry.com and serve a complete, valid HTML page saying it was busy, so a naive crawl ended up with thousands of files that looked fine and contained nothing. People had to go back and find those by grepping for the error text, delete them, and fetch them again. Large ranges in the middle of the table were still marked free on the day the site went dark.

~ who owned the name next ~

Within the same month the domain was sold again, to a Delaware company called Newton Rhymes, LLC. One of the two people behind it was Jeffrey Franz, who had co-founded Watermark Press in 1983 and sold the thing to Lulu in the first place. In January 2012 he relaunched poetry.com with a searchable database of poems submitted before 2012, which means some portion of what Lulu said it could not save had in fact survived the sale in somebody's backup. The restored archive was now owned by the man who had been selling those same poets hardbacks since 1983.

That version went offline without explanation in April 2018. The domain changed hands again in January 2021, to STANDS4, who run a network of reference sites and operate poetry.com today as something closer to a dictionary than a community. The name has outlived every business attached to it.

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