It saddens me to see new poets arrive at Soup only to be ignored. This is supposed to be such an accepting and inspiring community of people but what I see is nothing different than many other poetry sites I have been involved with, if you can’t break into a clique, your poetry doesn’t matter. It was the same for me when I first arrived here. After a few weeks I was ready to leave. I spent all of my time reading and commenting on poetry, that I found inspiring and learned a lot from, hoping to be accepted. I have since made many good friends here and met so many wonderfully talented poets. If it wasn't for a few caring poets on the site at the time who felt my frustration and asked me to give it a chance, I would have left. But this is not about me, though maybe who I once was here. I do try to read and comment on as many new poets as I can because I want them to feel welcomed here, but still it seems each time I do go in to read a new poet, I am the only one. Now that is not 100% of the time but it is most of time. I realize there are only so many hours in the day to read poetry and many of us are very busy during these times, but I am challenging you (Soupers) to find one new poet a day (or a week) and read them and leave a comment. Welcome them to Soup, make them feel comfortable, let them know that their poetry matters. We want people to be encouraged to stay here and share with all of us and I can assure you, I know from personal experience, that when a poet writes a poem, pours his or her heart out into it, is really proud of what they have written and they post it to see 10,20,30 views or more and not one person can say anything nice about their poem, it hurts and it hurts deeply. It makes you want to leave. I make you feel like your poetry sucks.
Now I know I am basically nobody here, I haven’t been here that long and no one owes me anything, I get that. But think about it, think about how many times you have posted a poem and had it ignored, how does that feel? And I know many will say, I write only for myself and my question would be, then why post it? We post poems to know if others like what we write, if our words somehow touch another, maybe make them smile or better yet, make them feel they are not alone in whatever emotion they may be dealing with at the time. Most of us write to express a feeling, send a message, get things off of our chests or hoping that by writing about it, it will help alleviate some of the pain we are feeling at the time. I love being here and want to try to make this the best poetry site on the web and I am sure many of you feel the same way. I’m just the only one dumb enough to say anything about it. Ok, I’ll shut up now.