[Carol Taylor]

Whether the editor takes the poem or not is up to the editor, but there is (or used to be) a technical distinction drawn between workshopping unfinished poems temporarily and publishing them.

Eratosphere used to distinguish itself from an online publishing site by pruning the critical threads on a monthly basis. That does call for a little time and trouble on the part of the administrator. I no longer post my poems here for critique because I no longer control the pruning and nobody else does it.

Moderators, you don't have to wait for Alex. Just delete any threads in your forum that haven't had activity in 30 days. Since you can't get into the admin console you'll have to do it manually.

An editor doesn't have to Google; he can drop in at Eratosphere and do a search and find just about any poem he's looking for. He can search by title, phrase or word, forum, or member name. And he can go back for months prior to the submission. For instance, I searched for the most recent Nemerov winner by author and title the other day and found it still up on The Deep End where it was workshopped several months back.

Sites that have archives are worse. You can search on a name and read the monthly archives at Gazebo, including critical forum archives. I'm not talking about "Noted on the Gazebo," which is a publishing site. A writer is asked for permission before his poem is Noted because it constitutes previous publishing. I'm talking about the workshops. I'm sorry folks, but in a site visible to an unlimited number of members even closed archives constitute publishing.

Most boards are starting to archive now. Why? To make a name for the site at the expense of the copyrights of their participants and any future editors who might publish the poems. They aren't interested in protecting the members from Googling and they sure aren't interested in keeping out lurkers. God forbid! They want to promote the site and reach as broad a readership as they can.

Many participants use such "workshops" as pseudo-publishing sites to showcase their work without the pain or expense of submissions and rejections. Many of these poems will never be submitted, and who cares? Anybody whose opinion counts has already seen them. This trend is probably at the root of the recent issue with publishers like Poetry who are now balking at taking poems with any internet exposure whatever.

Carol