Blog-posted poems redux

[from the blog Very Like a Whale, entry dated May 25th 2007]:

So what’s the lesson for the blogging poet who posts poems to a personal blog? It’s a hard one. I doubt that every editor googles every submission (even those who state they prefer not to publish blogged poems must in fact at some point have done so without realizing it) so it must be possible to ‘get away’ with having posted a poem on your own blog with these editors.

One approach often seen is when poets post poems to their blogs for a short period of time then take them down so as not to fall prey to trawling editors. But even if they stay up on the blog for five minutes, they have been posted to a personal blog, surely, and don’t they therefore fall into the no-no category for some editors? From my point of view, this presents something of an ethical dilemma (although I see how others may not see it that way).

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