August's featured poem

   

The Penny Blog's featured  poem for August 2026:

August, by Annette Wynne

August days are hot and still,

Not a breath on house or hill

[...]

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2020/08/august-annette-wynne.html

Penny's second (and third and fourth) million

 

It took 16 years, from our 2010 founding to September 2025, for Penny's Poetry Pages to reach 1 million page views. It took 10 months to gain our next million.  

We ended 2025 with almost 1.2 million views. That was up to 1.4 million by March, 1.8 million by May, and 1.95 million by the end of June. On July 12, we received our 2 millionth view. And there was more to come, as total page views continued to climb, first up to 3 million, and then over 4 million before month's end. 

All told, the blog received 2,391,201 page views in July alone – more views in a month than in all of the previous months combined.

For years PPB was trapped in a vicious circle: few visitors led to being ignored by search engines, which led to few visitors in the next month, and so on. Now it appears that the opposite is happening. After we reached 500,000 views, we began appearing in Google search, and viewership began to climb, from under 100 visits a day to more than 1,000. That led to other search engines like bing carrying us as well. As a result the number of visitors kept increasing, with daily page views sometimes as high as 10,000. 

This increasing availability on search engines has expanded not only our reach but our range, giving PPP an increasingly international profile. A glance at Google's statistics for this week illustrates that well: While our biggest source of visitors is still the United States (with 238,000 page visits), we also received more than 100,000 visits each from Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Germany. (Canada is not listed, alas.)

But search engines are just one part of the story; there have been other factors working to boost our viewership.  One that deserves acknowledgement is JLA Forums. 

After Google stopped providing a web portal to Usenet in 2004, JLA Forums stepped into the breach and began building an archive of selected Usenet groups. As per their policy of not allowing most external links, though, JLA omitted virtually all of the promotional posts that were a big part of the Usenet poetry groups in the early days (such as Rick Lupert's "Poetry Super Highway" notices). Originally they wanted to omit the PPB promos as well; however, when contacted by some of our readers, they quickly decided on an alternative way of dealing with them. 

Today virtually all past PPB posts appear on JLA Forums, and all new PPB poems are promoted there, complete with links to the blog. Rather than going to the blog, though, readers are directed to a mirror site where they can read it right on JLA Forums. In this way JLA gets the "click" or page view (and so does PPB: win-win). With at least one Usenet group getting as many as 100,000 visits a month on JLA  (so I've been told), that makes a big difference in the reach of our promotions. 

There are other factors in our growth, but let them wait for another day; I expect to be announcing further millions in the future. While this jump in numbers may be temporary, and could always collapse back to what it used to be, I am confident that our new mass viewership is here to stay, and has only just begun. 

Penny's Top 20 / July 2026

  

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in July 2026:

  1.  Tired of Waiting, Will Dockery

  2.  In the High Hills, Maxwell Struthers Burt

  3.  March, Edwin Arnold

  4.  Green, Paul Verlaine

  5.  To the Spring, John Davies

  6.  Vowels – Voyelles, Arthur Rimbaud

  7.  Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (IV-V), Ezra Pound

  8.  Poem for Kathy, Will Dockery

  9.  Flying Back in a Dream, JD Shirk

10.  Appeal, John Frederic Herbin

11.  A boat, beneath a sunny sky, Lewis Carroll

12.  To Helen [1848] , Edgar Allan Poe 

13.  Cedros, Jane G. Austin

14.  July, Annette Wynne

15.  The Mower to the Glow-Worms, Andrew Marvell

16.  June, Edgar Guest

17.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens

18.  Summer Morn in New Hampshire, Claude Mackay

19.  July in the West, James Newton Matthews

20. The Voice, Theodore Roethke

Source: Blogger, "Stats" 

July in the West / James Newton Matthews

July in the West

DAY

A rhythm of reapers; a flashing
Of steels in the meadows; a lashing
Of sheaves in the wheatlands; a glitter
Of grain-builded streets, and a twitter
Of birds in a motionless sky,—
And that is July!

A rustle of corn-leaves; a tinkle
Of bells on the hills; a twinkle
Of sheep in the lowlands; a bevy
Of bees where the clover is heavy;
A butterfly blundering by,—
And that is July!


NIGHT

A moon-flooded prairie; a straying
Of light-hearted lovers; a baying
Of far away watchdogs; a dreaming 

Of brown-fisted farmers; a gleaming
Of fireflies eddying nigh,—
And that is July!

A babble of brooks that deliver
Their flower-purpled waves to the river;
A moan in the marshes; in thickets
A dolorous droning of crickets,
Attuned to a whippoorwill's cry,—
And that is July!

~~
James Newton Matthews (1852-1910)
from The Lute of Life, 1911

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Reapers, 1785. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

James Newton Matthews biography

The Mower to the Glow-Worms / Andrew Marvell

The Mower to the Glow-Worms

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

~~
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
from Miscellaneous Poems, 1681

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Andrew Marvell biography

"The Mower to the Glow-Worms" read for Ming Aretê.

The Voice / Theodore Roethke

The Voice

One feather is a bird,
I claim; one tree, a wood;
In her low voice I heard
More than a mortal should;
And so I stood apart,
Hidden in my own heart.

And yet I roamed out where
Those notes went, like the bird,
Whose thin song hung in air,
Diminished, yet still heard:
I lived with open sound,
Aloft, and on the ground.

That ghost was my own choice,
The shy cerulean bird;
It sang with her true voice,
And it was I who heard
A slight voice reply;
I heard; and only I.

Desire exults the ear:
Bird, girl, and ghostly tree,
The earth, the solid air –
Their slow song sang in me;
The long noon pulsed away,
Like any summer day.

~~
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
from Words for the Wind, 1957

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Theodore Roethke biography

"The Voice" read by Theodore Roethke. Courtesy Theodore Roethke - Topic.

(Poem begins at 1:40)

Summer Morn in New Hampshire / Claude McKay

 

Summer Morn in New Hampshire

All yesterday it poured, and all night long
    I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
    Upon the grass like running children’s feet.
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
    Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
    And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.
But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
    The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
    The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
And all things were transfigured in the day,
    But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
For you, more wonderful, were far away,
    And I was blind with hunger for your love.

~~
Claude McKay (1889-1948)
from Harlem Shadows, 1922

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada the United States, and the European Union]

Claude McKay biography

"Summer Morn in New Hampshire" read by Narad.

Courtesy The Mother & Sri Aurobindo: E-library.