Introducing the Isle of Write's Poetry Pond
Message in a Bottle #3
Origin: The Isle of Write
Sender: geke
Recipients: Steemit Creatives
The Isle of Write is a breezy, sun-kissed, decentralized writers' group full of ocean metaphors and allowed alliteration (it's even encouraged). And it's there, in the Poetry Pond, you'll find me floating on the lily pad of life, reading lines penned by friends, encouraging adjectives, and rearranging syllables.
We don't have ranks in the Isle. Everyone milling about is either a writer or an editor and we all just toggle between those two roles, so there's really no reason to have some people lording over others. We're there to support, encourage, and suggest edits to one another. No poo-bahs necessary.
Because the appeal of the Steemit blockchain is its decentralized, transparent nature and we wanted the Isle of Write to function the same way.
And it's impressive to see all our different workshops growing, blossoming, and flourishing, including our island inlets for fiction, non-fiction, lyrics, plays, crypto, and freewrites. Poetry, though, is a passion of mine so my focus tends to be on Poetry Pond and I wanted to share some updates pertaining to our glistening body of wordsmithy waters.
We recently launched our first sailboat: a queue! Poetry being posted in the chat was starting to overlap and it was difficult to make sure everyone's work was getting a look, so @jrhughes created us a queue similar to the one used in the Fiction Fjord. Writers can paste their work into a Google doc, then fill out a submission form that populates our queue spreadsheet, complete with a link to the poem they'd like workshopped. Links to the submission form and the queue spreadsheet can be found pinned in Poetry Pond – just click the push-pin icon with a red dot in the upper-right-hand corner of your Discord screen.
And now, for our big news! Yesterday the Poetry Pond and the Isle of Write together celebrated a Steemit victory of sorts: one of our peeps received a @curie trail upvote for poetry!
Until now, poems have been extremely difficult to get “curied” because they tend to be shorter in length and their value is so subjectively determined. But “The Ring,” a longer poem by @geekorner – over 700 words – deftly utilized sophisticated poetic devices and impressed the curators. We're so proud of him and his work -- just look at the size of that upvote!
He's a fixture in Poetry Pond using the Discord handle Thunder_God. Not to mention, he's pretty much omnipresent in every other Isle channel, including our swim-up bar, The Pub, where all libations come with an umbrella!
So we hope you'll slip on your flip-flops and sail over to the Isle of Write to congratulate @geekorner, otherwise known as Thunder_God!
And while you're there, please visit us in the Poetry Pond. Feel free to tag @geke or @sunravelme if you need any help navigating our gentle eddies. In fact, come join us and make some big waves! (Okay, I’ll stop with the water metaphors now. It’s out of my system, anyway.)
Think you'd like to wash up on our shore?
The treasure map will bring you right to our door!
I'm sure all of my fellow curators at @curie would agree that we were impressed with this poem. It's great that, as a community, you are celebrating this together. That is wonderful to see. Keep up the good work folks and I am sure that more exposure will come your way.
Mark
That's wonderful to hear and it's kind of you to take the time to come by and share your thoughts. Thank you and all the hardworking curators and reviewers for this honor!
@Geke, thank you for this magnificent missive! I was happy to make a queue seeing how wonderfully full the Poetry Pond is already!
And thank you for sharing about the triumph of a poem being selected by Curie! What a fantastic few weeks it has been at the Isle <3
This warms my heart..... Water metaphors notwithstanding :-)
Ha ha @geke never stop with the water metaphors, there is an ocean to choose from ;-)
Fantastic news!! That is wonderful! Yay. And good to know the process of getting work looked at. going to share it in tomorrow's prompt.
Thank you kindly Geke for the kind words! And thanks to all the Isle members who've supported me with improving my recent poems!
To everyone else looking at this, it's nice to have the Isle because we all care and specialize in different things, from people who write in specific rhymes or meters, to people like me who write free-verse. And each of us could also provide a different level and type of support - I might not be able to help you find the right meter advice, but I could tell you when lines don't work, etc.
So just dive right in!
And here's to hoping the Curie floodgates will open to more poetry of all sorts to make the cut :)
Hi.@isleofwrite. You've got my impression on your poem. I hope you would impress also mine.Thank you. https://steemit.com/poetry/@aidguardian/poem-1-i-see-myself-at-sea-dedicated-to-maritime-industry
Congratulations @geekorner I am so happy to see your work recognized!