September 2015
E d i t o r ' s N o t e
Dear Verse-Virtual Poets and Friends,
The big news is that I started a Verse-Virtual group on Facebook. This is a place where you may post news, reviews of V-V poems, announcements, information, poems, ideas, thoughts, anything poetry-related — and more. I know that many of us aren't inclined to partake in social media (I wasn't until about a year ago), but even if you join Facebook there's no requirement to go there and anyhow you can always delete your account. Please feel free to take a look around:
www.facebook.com/groups/verse-virtual.
The big news is that I started a Verse-Virtual group on Facebook. This is a place where you may post news, reviews of V-V poems, announcements, information, poems, ideas, thoughts, anything poetry-related — and more. I know that many of us aren't inclined to partake in social media (I wasn't until about a year ago), but even if you join Facebook there's no requirement to go there and anyhow you can always delete your account. Please feel free to take a look around:
www.facebook.com/groups/verse-virtual.
I am happy to tell you that for this issue I received six submissions based on my suggested theme of "labor" (in honor of Labor Day). These outstanding poems were contributed by: Joan Colby, J.C. Elkin, Michael Gessner, Margaret Hasse, Ken Slaughter, and Barry Yeoman. Thanks to them for their thoughtful and poignant poems. (If I accidentally left your name off the list, PLEASE tell me!)
Verse-Virtual continues to grow. Google Analytics provided these statistics about the last thirty days:
—We have had 13,568 pageviews, 2,182 sessions, and 1,140 users. That means (I think) that 1,140 different users visited the site — some of them multiple times — and those persons viewed
13,568 pages all together.
—Users have come from 41 nations — the top ten are United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, India, Brazil, Australia, Nigeria, Germany, and France.
(Totals for the year: 141,064 pageviews, 19,975 sessions, and 8310 users.)
I thank you all for supporting and contributing to the Verse-Virtual family, where community strength grows as per interaction. Regardless of Facebook, our primary means of communication is via email. There is a simple ethic that governs our choice to write to each other: kindness. It is kind, good, and right to write to other V-V poets when you like their poems. Yes, we are a large group, and there are many poems here, but even if you write to a handful of people you are doing us (and yourselves) a great service. Please remember that V-V is anything but an ordinary journal. The regular rules don't apply here. We try to be unselfish.
I wish you the best of everything in this back-to-school month.
Sincerely,
Firestone Feinberg