English and stuff

The Poem

Poem in full form

How do I write a poem and get people to read it?

I think short poems are good because nowadays we are busy and flooded with information. Succinct is good. Attention spans are short.

Picture is also good. Therefore this piece.

The Publishing

I knew getting attention is hard, but I didn't imagine it to be that hard.

Part of the reason is because I waited till Monday 11pm to release my poem.

My main method of publication was to be via the internet.

I tried some poetry-friendly websites such as allpoetry.com.

Gained some views and comments from total strangers.

Poetry Site

Then I tried tumblr - which has no view counts but I do have some "reblogs" and "likes". Hopefully, my poem has gained more publicity this way.

I went to a forum site - gaiaonline - and posted it there.

Managed to have 35 people voting and 27 different people commenting on the thread. Again, it's uncertain how many people actually read the poem; the responses hint at a minimum.

Last but not least I attempted facebook.

Usually, there are notifications and you can see the number of "likes" "shares" and "comments". However, something went wrong and apparently the "like" and "comment" button went missing, as well as the notifications on the initial post.

The best I could do was to share the post in different facebook groups I belonged to, many of which contain people I do not know personally.

Group for Batchmates in Singapore

House Facebook Group

In smaller groups, there's the advantage of seeing exactly how many people and who has read your post:

Class facebook group

Enrichment activity facebook group

Extracurricular facebook group

"Philosophy" group - 40 members, started by a friend in the US

By offering some sort of incentive I was able to get complete strangers to share the post on facebook (not sure how many there are due to notification failure, but this person is kind enough to send me a screenshot):