No comment on your wimping out on the challenges. Well, except that one. (And that one. (And…))

marta: Thanks for the good wishes. It was a good and, yes, safe journey to a place in Florida I’d never been to before. (There are a lot of them, to be honest.) I’m not sure where in Florida you used to live; this was Melbourne. A strange mix of wonderful downtown and always-under-construction sprawl.

Sarah: I confess your question brought me up short. Like, “get around”? Which implies to me a sort of skulking thievery in the night.

I pretty much never grab something like a poem which I haven’t seen elsewhere on the Web. Furthermore, I try to honor the poet in ways which other sites often don’t: I look for the original version of the poem to confirm line breaks and line spacing.

(For instance, “Snow Geese” appears in many places around the Web. In none of them, including whiskey river, did I see the line indents as reproduced above; I found them only at the Google Books page which reproduced the poem as originally printed. My guess is that others are pretty much copying-and-pasting as they find the poems.)

For ten years, I’ve been on the Board of Directors of a small, independent, but nationally well-respected poetry press. I’m acutely aware of the dangers of posting poetry on the Web; at our site (where I’m also the Webmaster), we reproduce verbatim one or (usually) more poems of every one of our titles.

Would I be appalled to find any of our poems copy-and-pasted elsewhere? Not at all. Would I feel differently if they were my own poems? Nope. Would I happily remove — or formally credit, with little © symbol and all — any poem(s), song lyrics, and so on to whose posting the author objected? You bet I would.

Jules, above, mentioned the Web-wide Poetry Friday series. I’m not a participant in that (although I guess I could be), so I don’t often go to the sites which are. I know that as a rules-following librarian, Jules herself is scrupulous about including copyright information. I completely admire this (as well as many other things) about Jules and her 7-Imp site. But I don’t think it’s strictly necessary, and as I said, I’d be surprised if any poets felt violated by my not doing so at RAMH, of all places.

I’d love to hear from any I’ve plundered, though, so I can correct the problem!

Jules, who really wanted to do your six-words challenges, but everything I keep coming up with is too…I dunno…half-glass empty :)