Welcome To HPP (March 25th 2008)
Welcome to Half Pound Poetry, a site dedicated to exploring new ideas in poetry. There are two parts of HPP that we would like to point your attention to. First are our forums, open to everybody for anything from workshop-ing to debate, or even just chatting about life.
At the forums you will find a section called "Prompts". Our staff writers get most of their ideas from there, so whenever you have a challenge or thought you think would work for a poem, post it, and maybe one of the writers will use it.
The second section is our "Archives". HPP publishes poetry and thoughts on poetry; therefore, to make it easy to find and navigate both sections, we have separate archives for them. Please feel free to wander our past to better understand where we are going.
Lastly, HPP is not a site for simply patting poets on the back and saying good job; it is about trying to bring poetry to the masses, and therefore we are open to criticisms directed at all facets of this site: the poetry, the essay, or even the conventions.
Thanks,
-The HPP Writers
About HPP
What this site thinks it is doing
Half Pound Poetry is a community of poets that are bound together by their common desire to write poems that connect to their audience. At first the poems were only those that had been requested by readers and the poets that wrote for HPP consisted only of its creator, Chase.
In time it became apparent that HPP needed to request its own poems so to have a consistent out pouring of poetry. Luckily this realization came along with the idea that HPP should not just be one poet but rather a community. Now, HPP consists of a handful of poets who take prompts from readers and members alike so to both challenge their own conventions and make poetry relevant to the masses.
Half Pound Poetry is a free site; members and reader alike contribute and take from HPP with no cost to them. Though our name might seem to imply that poems cost fifty pence, in reality the poems are free and will be as long as we keep getting donations.
If you are interested in HPP or are just confused, please email us at halfpoundpoety [at] gmail [dot] com.
We are currently looking for new members, so please visit our “Join” page and see if you have what it takes to be a HPP poet.
Thanks,
The Poets
Why "Half Pound Poetry"
Where did such a name come from?
Chase spent 3 months in London struggling to survive the whole time on the income of a jobless man. So, before he left for England, a few members of HPP started to joke about the idea of “Busking” poetry on the London Underground. Though this is illegal, and Chase never did so, the idea of selling poems for fifty pence (or half a pound) stuck, not so much as a price but as a title, hence “Half Pound Poetry”.
