As many of you know, I am a big fan of New Verse News. Few journals match them in variety, vitality, and relevance. Many MFA-correct journals and online sites sites filter out poems that break spoken and unspoken academic rules, filtering out poems that may even have rough edges but say something important or say something in an interesting way, but even for those journals that don’t, few offer the enjoyment I get from reading the poems shared on WordPress blogs or New Verse News.
New Verse News also provides important historical value. It captures the thoughts from a wide range of poets, some never before published online and some that have been published in top-tier journals or are poetry contest winners. It’s a great site for historians to visit, twenty years from now, or twenty-two hundred years from now.
I have a list of over 4,000 journals that publish poetry: some do so online, some in print, some do both. As noted in last week’s Thoughtful Thursday column, I enjoy checking out both poetry blogs and poetry sites to read new work. Sometimes these poems fall short of expectations; sometimes they are well worth the effort of hunting them down.
Today, I randomly picked entry 1613 in my poetry list, a journal named Poemeleon. I knew I was in for a treat reading the description of their content: “Quirky/Humorous/Lyric” and “Playful/Lyrical work.” This sounds great, I thought. As readers of this blog know, I am a fan of Zumwalt’s poetry — which generally is more disruptive or snide than lyrical, but is often quirky, humorous, or playful. I am also a fan of Louise Glück for the lyricism, emotional depth, and overall precision of her writing. And she can also be disruptive and humorous, as in her poem Anniversary. I can say the same about Kenneth Koch — precise control, sometimes lyrical, sometimes disruptive, often playful, clever and/or humorous. Well, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of such poets, and I clicked on the Poemeloen link to discover some of the lesser-known such poets.
I would like to say that when I first landed on their home page, I was greeted with the above image — the image of the poemeloen, a distinctive and highly specialized clade of a large family of contemporary online journals that champion a diverse range of poetry. And to some degree I was, though it was much smaller. However, what immediately confronted me was the image of the “SORRY WE ARE CLOSED” sign at the top of this blog post.
Above that closed sign was this very small version of their logo and additional text:
Well, in truth, I was pretty undeserving of any thanks. I never supported this site, nor even visited it until today. And now, despite its ability to blend in (or maybe because of its ability to blend in) with its background, it is now another entry in a long list of defunct poetry journals. It could clearly show a range of colorful poetry, and vary what was displayed. But it was eventually overwhelmed by its changing environment: a world where many people have substituted clicking, reacting, and sometimes sharing (though can one really share what isn’t theirs?) for engaged reading.
However, the poems are still there! And their founder’s mission is still intact: “poemeleon seeks to make visible the invisible. By placing disparate poems alongside one another, I aim to highlight not just their contrasts, but their similarities.”
For how long, though? Eventually, the domain will be unfunded, and the poems will not be so easily accessible. I say, “not so easily,” because, thankfully, we have The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has captured content from this site and its predecessor 296 times between February 23, 2007 and April 20, 2026. Compare that to our site, zumpoems.com which has been saved 217 times between November 1, 2011 and July 8, 2026, and one can feel pretty good that as long as Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is enabled, all the poems that the site’s editors (there were multiple: https://poemeleon.me/missionandhistory) ended up selecting from the many submissions sent to them over the years will be avaible for those willing to take the extra effort to track them down.
One day, I won’t be around to fund zumpoems.com. At that point, much of Zumwalt’s work will be lost forever — except for the captures of this site in the Internet Archive. How long will that site be around? Maybe it doesn’t matter, as eventually there will be very few people who will still have the ability to read. The poems will still be around, and they can be read out loud by our AI assistants, but will those AI readers ever understand the meaning of even the simplest or most transparent poem to provide a meaningful enough reading to engage even their most receptive user?
I have no plans to stick around to find out, but if AI extends my life long enough, I guess whatever plans I do eventually make may matter very little.
I am pleased to announce that one of Zumwalt’s poems, “Out of Schlitz,” has been published in Light, the premier online journal for light verse and the oldest and most widely recognized publication in the United States dedicated entirely to witty and humorous poetry. Please visit here: https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/poems-of-the-week/out-of-schlitz/
Text of poem as featured at Light is below.
Poems of the Week
Out of Schlitz
by Zumwalt
“Schlitz Premium, a beer brand that traces its roots to Milwaukee in the 1840s and was once among the largest breweries in the country, is being put ‘on hiatus,’ parent company Pabst Brewing Co. confirmed Friday after Wisconsin Brewing Company announced it would brew the brand’s final batch later this month.” —Fox Business News
With measured trends and spreadsheets came those analysts who killed a name: A brew that tastes of bowling shoes Is poured out as financial news.
Pabst ran the math, it weighed the yield, And marched the yeast right off the field. As taste gets dated, margins shrink: So bid farewell to Granddad’s drink.
But wait ten years, they’ll give us more In high-gloss cans from every store; They’ll charge a fortune for the thrill Of drinking this fermented swill.
— Zumwalt (May 2026)
Published on May 25, 2026
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Never one to walk away from controversy or beer, Zumwalt has also sent us a revised version of a free verse poem on this topic that he penned earlier last week:
When You’re Out of Schlitz
They have officially placed the yeast on hiatus, a term previously reserved for exhausted child stars and caught-on-mic morning show hosts.
Now, it is gracefully applied to a twelve-ounce can that tastes predominantly of 1974 and bowling shoe rentals.
The pivot was, naturally, data-driven: a team of strategists, hydrating on premium energy drinks marketed as performance optimizers, determined the current legacy yield could no longer justify an aging brew.
So now the fermentation tanks are quietly drained, the hops offered a highly competitive severance package. It isn’t a termination, the press release insists, just a strategic realignment.
Perhaps in a decade, they will exhume Schlitz in a slim, matte-finish can and rebrand it as a premium heritage artifact for postal codes that treat commercial failure as a high-end aesthetic.
Until then, we must manage the sudden loss of this reliably unglamorous liquid as the last can is flattened against the concrete.
Your regalia creaks and groans A panoply of rust and whining joints Moira’s chess game begins And already you’ve been rooked
Charge full-tilt at windmills Or Settle for an electric fan Just keep moving Or God’s heating element Will fry your soul And scorch rationality Maintain that effervescent personality And disco on the Teflon of life
As the sun browns out And your Zippo’s flint disintegrates Grope along the nitred steps And nestle in your excelsior storage crate
Relax and let the Sony vomit Search for a bebop sax (The opiate of the cool) Kicked back, you realize You might just slit your Jugular while shaving tomorrow Fate won’t have you to kick around anymore.
“The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a panel made up of President Donald Trump’s appointees, on Thursday approved his proposal to build a ballroom larger than the White House itself where the East Wing once stood. […] Members of the public were asked to submit written comment by a Wednesday afternoon deadline. Thomas Leubke, the panel’s secretary, said ‘over 99%’ of the more than 2,000 messages it received in the past week from around the country were in opposition to the project.” — Associated Press (https://apnews.com/article/trump-white-house-ballroom-commission-fine-arts-f2a15d0b1c9c95f24816fe60b6b1ee5f)
From the Ground Up
The Greatest Ballroom, Trump proclaimed, shall rise upon the White House lawn— with funds from donors I have tamed— and built before you know I’m gone.
Two thousand wrote from sea to sea, with almost everyone opposed; the Fine Arts panel nixed their plea and voted that the case was closed.
A pity some have come to think that honesty means not a thing, but that’s the depth to which we sink when a joker crowns himself a king.
(Update: To see the poem, please click on here or the link above– you can see the redacted words in the poem this way.)
If you enjoy sampling a wide range of styles of poetry, reading poems that address interesting and relevant topics, or just reading engaging material, I recommend you visit New Verse News and take advantage of their free subscription — scroll down a bit and the subscription option is on the right side of the page. This is one of the most enjoyable contemporary poetry publications online.
Gibbon and Toynbee bump into Spengler at Starbucks
Steel glass shafts Glint skyward Glittering silver deceptively erect Yet reality is whispered With salient impotence In sequins, basking They are ripe for a gaudy technicolor cave-in To a Muzak score Rotten props, rotten struts, rotten foundations
Polished pillars once We’ve lost the varnish And revel in the grease-spots And ember-burns While concealing our leprous nudity in faded Purple Thus we pursue Byzantium At a break-neck stagger into the nitre trough To be the feast of Seljuk flies Humming 4-chord progressions Rotten rags, rotten flesh, rotten sensibilities
No phoenix pyre The red of flame metamorphosed to rust And blue-bright iron Decays to dust Rubble spawning weeds And housing ravenous mandible-clapping insects Living but to shun the day And suck the husk Of desiccated brains
This is quite an honor to have three lengthy poems of this level of density and abstraction published on a high-traffic site like The Good Men Project. Please visit if you have a minute.
This is a highly visited online publication per Gemini AI: “The Good Men Project:~2 – 3 Millionmonthly visitors (varies by source, sometimes listed as 1.9M unique visitors)“
FYI -- the formatting for "roads closed" was lost when posted on their site.
UPDATE: Roads closed was immediately removed from their website, requested by me, due to formatting issues. I will post an update when Roads closed is published again.
Here is “The Great Healthcare Plan,” The finest concept known to man. No need to think of how this works Or who this helps and who this hurts.
This policy is the greatest, most wonderful healthcare dream, The biggest savings anyone has ever known or seen. We’ll slash the drugs, making deals with forced consent, By three hundred, four hundred — five hundred percent!
We can’t pay off the middle men, That’s up to you to do, my friend. If you need more to make you well, Then just follow our plan, straight to… well… straight to where I might one day dwell.
