Poems Online : the hard, dark and dirty side is reborn.

So I heard that geocities is closing down soon, leaving many an animated gif completely homeless. Luckily Deep Underground Poetry, a website founded at the height of geocities popularity, has just been reborn.

The internet was a sparse and baron place when it came to interactive opportunities online and Deep Underground grew organically, from its beginnings as a single issue e-zine (online magazine), eventually becoming home to a small community of about 400 poets from 1999 - 2000.

They were able to post their poems in various categories (including gothic, erotica, angst and drugs) and later in a portfolio page format. People could critique other peoples' poems and leave feedback in the "guestbook" (does anyone remember when every website had one of those?).

The millennium failed to see off the entire universe, but the year 2000 did see a lot of dot coms go under, and one day the free host (not geocities sadly) that was home to Deep Underground Poetry, vanished mysteriously one day taking the website with it. No warning, no explanation, and no recent back up.

The poems and other content from Deep Underground's most recent back up, which covered about 6 months of stuff during 1999/2000, lay nestled away on a floppy disk collecting dust. In 2009 I retrieved the data from it and began hatching a plan to restart Deep Underground Poetry : on a new website, with its own domain (and with regular backups).

The internet has changed a lot in the last 10 years, but there is still nothing quite like Deep Underground Poetry, and I feel there is still a space for the website in the internet of now.

The response has been positive and in the first 3 months of the re-launch (starting August 2009) the new website has attracted over 500 registered members/poets, without really receiving any search engine traffic yet (they don't like new domains it appears).

If you write, read or want to discuss poetry then I invite you to check it out. The categories have changed a bit (new ones added) and the website has moved on with lot more features than its predecessor (for example the forums). Deep Underground Poetry is still committed to the originally ethos of freedom of speech and its mission to provide an alternative to the traditional concept of poetry.

So come and publish your poems (all rights remain with the poet) and express yourself on Deep Underground.

View dark poems, erotic poems or check out any of the other poem sections (fantasy, drugs, self, angst, observational, upbeat and love) from the home page...

Deep Underground.