I don't see why it's necessary to make such a fuss over this and start contacting everybody. As far as I'm concerned, the Sphere is a workshop, and it's purpose is to discuss works in progress. Poems appear here for a short period of time, and then disappear, and - on my part - if I'm sending one out which is still up here, I take it down myself. And - despite Matt's problem - it works. It works just fine.
I take the stance that this isn't publishing - it's workshopping - and act accordingly. And 99% of the poetry world either takes the same approach, or simply doesn't think about it. Why do you have to bother bringing it up at all? Publishers who don't think it through, or who don't understand the nature of the Sphere, or who decide - if you insist on pinning them to the wall - that it's safest to be utterly holy - may think through something they've never bothered about, and decide that they don't want anything that's appeared on the Sphere. So what do we do then? Change the title and the first two lines? Stop workshopping? Or just let the dammed thing lie, and not go off and raise a fuss because the first lines of two of Matt's poems appeared on a scuzzbag site. It is not a big problem. Please don't turn it into one.
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