February 27th forum announcement

Please note that the below announcement was written and posted at 20-something poety forums last night. Blogger kept signing me out, and only tonight can I post again. And I still had six posts to put up, including the time-sensitive link to the article on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 200th birthday.)

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Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags

Blogger is down for my account, so leave the Poetry & Poets in Rags blog link be for a while. It is not in this announcement post. Go with the usual one above at the IBPC site. I will speak of my experience with Google's Blogger below.

This is our biggest issue ever.

It is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 200th birthday! In his day, he was bigger than any writer alive today, certainly any American writer. His impact on culture was huge. We are remiss, forgetful, and misunderstand him, if he and his works are not on our syllabi.



Also in News at Eleven, note the article on Maurya Simon. She is confirmed as our IBPC judge for July-August-September this year. She was our first contact at UC Riverside, and brought us our terrific judge from last year, Judy Kronenfeld, also from that college. Maurya herself was referred to us by Robert Pinsky. And we are currently in communication with another poet and teacher there, the esteemed Chris Buckley. New names, new friends. These are great people and fabulous poets.

We have two additions to Great Regulars this week. First, The American Muslim has been publishing very good poetry that has made News at Eleven, so they're in.

For our second addition to Great Regulars: PBS is bringing a series of articles written by Jeffrey Brown as he travels in the Middle East. It's called "Voices of Conflict." Here is how it is billed: "A series of reports from Jeffrey Brown, who travels to the Middle East to provide insight into the lives of Israeli and Palestinian poets by the NewsHour." We have the first four installments.

Back to the blog, and how Blogger is both incapable of not going down frequently, but also has seriously blundered in their decisions for writers. Blogger may never solve the problem that is keeping me from posting, or may take days like they did last time. As I have with one of my blogs, I may need to switch Poetry & Poets in Rags over WordPress.

Since becoming owned by Google, Blogger has become a recklessly arrogant company. They have no compuction with revealing pen names of writers. In fact, they have decided to do it. That is the prerogative of the writer: only. This could get one of us hurt, harassed, or killed. And it does not matter whether we are in Eritrea or the USA, does it? There are plenty of killers to go around.

Blogger Support has received numerous e-mails from me outlining their blunder, and they choose to do nothing about it. I don't like them now. Those who are making decisions are not nice people. It has been clearly explained to them. However, in the outside chance that it is a matter of the staff being incapable of addressing issues or understanding them, they are dangerously incompetent. Or maybe just viciously remiss.

Decisions were made at the programming level. Instead of protecting bloggers, they've decided to put us at risk. Probably most, maybe all, other blog companies would not do this. I know that WordPress asks the blog owner which name posts should be attributed to. Why would they do otherwise? The WordPress people are real people, as I am sure other blog companies are too.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

IBPC Home

IBPC Newswire

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