Lulu shutters Poetry.com

Digital Journal reports that the print-on-demand publisher Lulu has closed the online poetry sharing community it established in 2009 when it bought the domain poetry.com. The free site, where thousands of members posted their own poetry, commented on others and competed amongst each other for ratings, can still partially be viewed on the Internet Archive. It was last crawled in October where the top poems of the moment give a glimpse into the community's collective psyche: "Depression Loved Suicide," "Violent Mêlée" and "My Mother."

Author Alexander Baron notes that while the site featured a prominent link encouraging members to publish their poetry in book form via Lulu, that doesn't necessarily mean it was a scam all along, as some have contended — the internet's answer to the 6-point type poetry contest ads stuffed in the backs of magazines and promising huge returns in prize money, scholarships or publishing contracts. Poetry.com was always more of an open mic than a path to becoming a literary darling or "internet famous" and that may have been tough for some of its users to swallow.