Of course, writers are their own worst critics.  To this effect, and perhaps as our own way to fight the inner critique, a few years ago (actually… quite a few years ago, now), the lovely Jennifer Rose, the witty Alex Maki and I decided to embark on a little experiment.

We thought,

“What if we could create a space where people, especially people who perhaps don’t normally write poetry, could try their hand at it?  Without feeling intimidated or judged?  Where all submissions would be welcome, and feedback/critique offered only if invited?  But let’s up the ante, and create this space in an online forum, to connect with others, strangers, who might be looking for the same thing.”

Thanks to Blogger, we were able to create this space.  We named it “Terrible Poetry from Terrible People” (and no, the implications of the name are not lost on us; we figured we might as well start at the bottom and work our way up to greatness).

Here’s the thing: ironically, the vast majority of the poems on this site are the opposite of what you’d expect.  They are incredibly GOOD.  Many of them are gorgeous feats of literary art, in all honesty to the point where people should be giving our contributing poets money to read the beautiful words they’ve written.

I went back to the site the other day and browsed through past contributions, and was simply in awe of how well that project worked for awhile.  It has been some time since we’ve had regular postings on it (sadly, we had events and obstacles in our lives that interfered, slowly weaning us away from it), but with all of my recent epiphanies about writing in general – and renewed resolve to hit some benchmarks with my own writing – I realized I’d love to see this blog shine again.

So click here and take a look.  Wander around the site awhile.  See if anything strikes a chord.  Let me know if you’d like to post something of your own.  As I said… write poetry without judgement.  And see what great things can happen.

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