Poetry is the secret to The Awl's success (right?)

An awl is  a tool for scratching marks on wood. The Awl is an eclectic Web site featuring a potpourri of arts, culture, silliness, snark, and poetry. Yes, poetry! Do the two awls have anything in common? Maybe, maybe not, but that's beside the point.

From the New York Times:

In an age of hyper-targeted vertical sites, The Awl is all over the road. In the last week, the site published a column about foreclosures, a piece describing what it feels like to be chided by Gene Simmons, an illustrated essay on the virtues of the breaststroke, tips on picking up obnoxious hipster girls and yes, poetry in the, yes, poetry section.

The Awl went from under 100,000 unique visitors a month to half a million in just one year. It spawned sister sites, and has actually made a profit. So what's so special about the AWL? In a media landscape populated by monster-sized media conglomerates, the small start-up doesn't have a chance. Or does it?

The very idea of a little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales. The Awl is attempting to tunnel under those efforts by building a low-cost site that delivers a certain kind of content for a certain kind of audience. And the owners don’t have to get rich — The Awl has no investors — they just have to eat.

Check out this past Friday's poetry section, featuring work by Robin Beth Schaer, selected by Mark Bibbins.