[Roger Slater]

I've often advocated for a password-protected forum, and the only real argument against it seems to have been that having the forums visible to the general public is how we attract new members. If people are now beginning to see the lack of password protection as a disincentive to posting, that rationale fades in importance. As far as the new member issue is concerned, it ought to be enough if we have a guest log-in account that lets people read any forum if they go through the slight effort of logging in.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Many folks from the 'sphere have published books now, and I suspect it's hard to keep the enthusiasm for workshops up after some success and recognition. I'd frankly like to see all of the poetry forums password-protected if that will keep the poems off Google.

[Brian Allgar]

I agree with Julie and Mary. After all, having two 'open' metrical boards has seemed unnecessary to some of us for a long time. Making The Deep End password-protected would a) help to reassure those who don't post for fear of being pirated, and b) thereby perhaps give a new lease of life to TDE, which is currently showing only spasmodic signs of life. Those who still react with wild laughter in the throat of plagiarism could continue to post on the open Metrical board.

And it would make a neat counterpart to its older sibling, Deep Drills.

[Michael Cantor]

Can somebody point to an actual case - beyond the British humor competitions we have protected in Drills & Amusements - where a poem was rejected because it was workshopped on the Sphere? I'm willing to listen, but I just don't see this as a significant problem.

I do agree with Andrew F. re the deterioration of the Sphere. A number of active and talented players are no longer as active, and I'm seeing less good poetry (including my own), less good crits, and more let's-talk-about-the-meaning-of-life or let's-talk-about-me blather. There always seems to be a run of this from July to September - both the summer school break, and the return, seem to impact the Sphere, and then things seem to improve as the academic year progresses, but overall the Sphere ain't what it used to be (look at the tiny impact of Shaun Russel's well-meaning attempt to restore The Deep End) and I can't blame the lack of a pass-word protected forum. I hope it's not Gresham's Law.

[Roger Slater]

Michael, I can't point to such a case since my memory is bad, but I do believe someone here once reported having a Poetry acceptance rescinded as a result of being posted here. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

But that doesn't really matter, for a couple of reasons. I submit to at least one top children's market that would, in my judgment, turn down a poem if they discovered it online in any form whatsoever. I have not suffered the consequences because I know their policy and have therefore been wise enough not to test it.

But more fundamentally, even if there were no danger of editors disqualifying work that appears here, I still see absolutely no reason why anyone would prefer to have their work-in-progress displayed for all the world to see. I get it that you don't mind having your work-in-progress publicly displayed, but your preference for having it publicly displayed seems to suggest that you view the workshop at least in part as a showcase, which it's not supposed to be. If you don't view the workshop as a showcase, then I can't for the life of me understand why you are reluctant to indulge those of us whose sense of privacy is different from your own.

Again, the only rational reason I have heard for not making a password-protected workshop area would be the idea that public display of the workshops helps recruit new members, and without new members the community will perish. I accept that, but I also would suggest that the community is facing an equal or greater danger from the unwillingness of so many poets to post their work in a public forum.

[Susan McLean]

Michael, this is from Rattle's guidelines for submission:
Rattle does not accept work that has been previously published, in print or online (we do consider self-publishing to blogs, message boards, or Facebook as publication if it can be viewed publicly without login).

I have submitted to Rattle many times and have never been accepted there. My submissions have always contained poems that I have workshopped here. Admittedly, there are many reasons that my work may have been rejected, but I have to wonder whether one of them might be my workshopping. I think Rattle's policy is wrong and does a lot of harm to online workshops of poetry. But Rattle will do what the editors please. To me, the benefits of workshopping poems outweigh the benefits of getting into Rattle, so I may just stop submitting there. But it would be nice to be able to do both.

Susan

[Norman Ball]

Maybe tangential, but...

The ever-shrinking community of poetry never fails to find new ways of shrinking itself anew. Poetry is not a tube of toothpaste that should be returned to the merchant because the package has already been tampered with. Nor should poetry soil from frequent use. Anyway who's clamoring for bootleg copies of unreleased material? Any eye, however it is attained and wherever it's caught peering, is both a good eye and a potentially market-enlarging eye for the craft. A third-world nation that erects tariffs slits its own throat. Nobody's buying in the first place.

It's a shame the erstwhile proponents of poetry betray an allergy to used poetry as though they too believe it's a consumable like knitting. No wonder the latter is beating our socks off. I say this to the editors out there who seem to be on a first-order mission of proving their genius for 'surfacing fresh talent' or 'undiscovered jewels'. As usual, it boils down to everything but the poetry. Has the whole world lost the place to an emporium mentality, poets too?

[Roger Slater]

I agree that the idea of not publishing work that has been published before is often just plain silly in application. If you published a wonderful poem ten years ago in a regional literary magazine that ran off 700 copies and managed to sell a few dozen in the local bookstore, why on earth would an editor who admires that poem and would otherwise want to publish it today have a problem with that? Is he really worried that his readers will know the poem and feel they have been handed recycled goods?

[Norman Ball]

It speaks (unwitting) volumes to what the inner circle (poetry's keenest advocates, God help it) think of poetry, appraise it, value it. Enough blaming the telly-watchers. We have located the malaise --and it lies at the center of the art.

[Michael Cantor]

Yes, it's tangential (Norm's #17). But that's okay. It's so difficult to wade through the language and pick up your argument that I think "tangential" is the least of the problems. But I do feel that when a site dedicated to poetry overflows with this kind of convoluted double-somersault-with-a-reverse-twist approach to making a simple point, it doesn't encourage participation by poets.