Does Gothic.net Have a Poetry Section?
 

Hey guys! Please pardon me if this topic has been discussed to death. Although I knew about Gothic.net's existence a long time ago, I never ventured beyond a casual dalliance.

I purchased a copy of "The Gothic Bible" by Nancy Kilpatrick from Amazon. Not-so-random chunks (read: images) and entire pages were missing from it, so unfortunately, I was pretty deterred by the reading experience. Still, what I've read so far was good and I plan to finish it once my friend is done with it. If I remember correctly, I read some words from a poetry editor from Gothic.net; I was shocked since at that point, I regularly cruised the forums and checked out its articles as well as their publication listings.

I am the editorial assistant for a pretty popular zine and an editorial intern at a site that's devoted to listing poetry markets. Most of the submissions that my zine receives are poetry. A significant portion of my high school AND college education was devoted to studying Gothic poetry as well as writing it, preferably in one of the local graveyards (including the one on campus!) or the woods. Basically, what I'm trying to convey is how I spend A LOT of time thinking about poetry as a literary art-form and profitable niche market in the general literary economy.

I know that Gothic.net lets members share their poetry here, but what if there was a separate section on the site for poetry? The Gothic subculture is one of the most fertile places to have a poetry section, regardless of whether they choose their poems from a formal submission process or forum posters. Incorporating a poetry publication of sorts could very well generate traffic, especially if the poems are accompanied with awesome drawings. Let's face it: this is a literary site and if someone goes jonesing for any gothic literature, they're bound to come to this site. It's one of the first things that comes up whenever I google "gothic literature", "gothic literary zine", etc.

It's upsetting to hear how common it is for people to use the term "goth" with a negative connotation, especially when poetry is the subject at hand. The thing is, my experiences have shown me that people seem to really love Gothic and dark poetry. I think that by Gothic.net having a poetry publication of some kind, they could tap into another market that, with ad revenue and all that jazz, could prove to be profitable.

Facts? Insights? Anything feedback would be interesting.

Nope. Normally members post their own poetry in threads they've started on their own in the Literature Thread. Given the age of the site, it will take quite a while to find all of them and most of the original posters are long gone.

I was secretly praying that you'd respond. Thanks for answering my prayers!

Yes, I am well aware of this site's age and its poverty of OG's (original goths, that is!). I just keep thinking how this site could be so much more and has the potential to soar beyond the glory days that it has previously known. Right now, Gothic.net is an internet equivalent of an abandoned Victorian mansion. It can be renovated or at least re-peopled with friendly squatter-collectivists! I just can't get over what a waste of a perfect platform it is. I've spent nights thinking about it.

Do you think the overlords might be open to it if I pitched the idea? I don't think that there would be any problem garnering interested parties to submit because, well, what the hell is cooler than being published by a web zine with the word "Gothic" in the title?

I don't see why not. Give the admin an e-mail and see if they get back with you on it. Never hurts to try :)

I know that you said it never hurts to try, but man, I had to make sure my query letter was covered in as much blood as possible. All of it donated in cruelty-free ways from free-range ranches.

So yeah. I told them that it'd be cool to use this as a platform for its own literary magazine and it might inspire a renaissance in the traffic that this site/forum gets. I almost can't believe that these forums have descended to this level of inactivity. I see so much potential.

Anyway, I hope it works out. That'd be a really sweet deal.

When they last revamped the site, they said we would get more literature. That was a year or two ago? We still got the pop culture reviews but that's all that came of it.

So I'm not crazy. Cool.

I think it's cool that literary magazines and publications can openly advertise here without people crying spam. Why? Because the people who frequent this site are more open to "bone-chilling literary culture" than most other places. If GNet established a literary zine in and of itself, it'd be like a pleasure avalanche. And the contributors wouldn't only have to be restricted to members if they wanted more variety.

I hope that they respond to me. :p

Yes, there is a Poetry thread (not a section per se), called the Reincarnation of the Poetry Thread:
http://gothic.net/boards/showthread.php?t=3255&page=35