Thoughtful Thursday: Ongoing Extinctions; Darwinism in the World of Poetry Journals
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.
