[Golias]

Having trouble protecting from spiders your workshopped verse you'd like to submit to Poetry or other journals with illiberal policies toward online appearance? Here's a trick that might work.

1. Use a title for the workshop version different from the one you would use in submitting to a print journal.
2. Precede the workshop version with several lines of boilerplate: masking verse, doggerel, or whatever --in italics so critters in the know can ignore it but search engines will treat it as real text of the search result, and a search for your subsequent title or first lines will turn up nothing.

Here's what I plan to use as a mask when I next post a poem at TDE.


Il Ragno

Hence, loathsome robot spider,
Of Cyberus and blackest motive hatched;
on wireless web dispatched.
Probe not this poor provider
to my anorexic purse,
this embryonic, unbyronic verse.
A proper spider boldly moves on missies.
Creeps like you are misbegotten sissies;
So hence, begone, avaunt, and take this buffet,
back to your boss and bid him stuff it up his tuffet.


G/W