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Website for verse
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Get your poetry published free at poetsindia.com
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EFFORTS BY a friend to publish her poems online set M. Venkatachalam thinking about starting a website for publishing poetry free. And in April, 2000, poetsindia.com was on the favourites list of wannabe poets across the country and abroad. Two months from the day the British Council Deputy High Commissioner D. J. Utley launched poetsindia.com, the website crossed the 1000-poem mark, encouraging the team to launch an all-India advertisement campaign.
Actually, much before this campaign, there was a move to popularise the website. In the first month, a poetry contest with a millennium diamond pendant worth Rs. 18,000 as first prize, was held. The poetry contest continued for a year, with the winner's purse swelling with Rs. 5,000. It was professional to the core, with English professors from city colleges roped in to judge the entries.
The website is alive and kicking, although enthusiasm of the early days has died down. Now, it features 1,729 poets and displays 8,458 poems, which can be called, author-wise or theme-wise. Poets can exchange notes or thrash out issues on an uncensored discussion board.
Among the latest inclusions are the provision for featured poets to have their own home pages and a visual poetry sub-site called verscapes.com, which contains non-copyrighted pictures accompanied by poetic lines by Sheela K. Sharath.
With IIT Madras having trained him to be a mechanical engineer and IIM, Ahmedabad, to be a management professional, this Chennai-based businessman does not have to depend on the poetry website for a living. But he continues to sweat over it, simply for the love of poetry.
PRINCE FREDERICK
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