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 gets 1,000,000 page views

On September 21, 2025, Penny's Poetry Blog received its millionth page view: a goal we had been hoping and working for since our founding more than 15 years ago. For years it seemed that we would never reach the magic 1,000,000. To put that figure into perspective: six years ago – nine years after our beginning – we still had less than 350,000 views in total. In contrast, we received almost that many views (318,000) in the last 12 months alone. 

What changed? The short answer is that PPB poetry is increasingly showing up on google searches. But that did not happen by itself or overnight. It took years, and thousands of page views, to reach that point; years of finding, blogging, and promoting poems until we became big enough to be noticed. While we are grateful for the resulting flood of new readers, most of all we appreciate those readers who have supported us since the beginning. We hope that all of our readers, both old and new, stay with us as we pursue our next 1,000,000 views.

New poetry collection from George J. Dance

November saw the first printing of Logos, and other logoi, a second poetry collection from George J. Dance. The book collects poems written from 1972 to 2021. It is a companion volume to his first collection, Doggerel, and other doggerel (2015): the two books contain slightly over 100 poems, grouped in a cycle of a year. 

Logos, and other logoi (2nd edition) is available for purchase on Amazon.com.  

New chapbook from poet AE Reiff

Frequent contributor to The Penny Blog AE Reiff has a new book, The True Light that Lights, published by Parousia Reads in October as part of its Parousia Christian Poetry Chapbook series. Copies for Kindle can be ordered on Amazon here. 

Reiff has been a long-time contributor to Penny's Poetry Blog. A selection of his work, including poems from his new book, can be read here.

Will Dockery Selected Poems released

The Selected Poems 1976-2019 of American poet Will Dockery, edited by Penny's Poetry Blog publisher George J. Dance, were published last month in the U.S.A. by Dockery, and in Canada by Principled Press (Dance's imprint). 

The book brings together poetry and song lyrics from all 5 decades of Dockery's career so far, to give an intimate look at the man and his work. You can order the book on Amazon.

Will Dockery has been a long-time contributor to Penny's Poetry Blog. A generous selection of his work, including several poems from his new book, can be read here.

Doggerel, and other doggerel: new collection by George J. Dance

George J. Dance, proprietor of  The Penny Blog and the Penny's Poetry Pages wiki, is pleased to announce the publication of his first poetry collection, Doggerel, and other doggerel.

Doggerel contains roughly 50 short poems, written over 44 years (1972-2015). The book also contains translations of works by Tu Fu ("Spring Scene"), Arthur Rimbaud ("Romance Novel," "Sensation," "Vowels"), and Heinrich Heine ("Lorelei's Song").

Poems that can be sampled on  The Penny Blog include "Spring Again," "Round the Mercury," "Mars & Avril," "May," "Only the Lonely," "June," "Lucky Penny," "July," and "Light of Day."

Doggerel, and other doggerel is published by Lulu.com. For a substantial discount, you now have the option to order the book at Amazon.com as well.

Update, January 2025: Logos and other logoi, the companion volume to Doggerel and other doggerel, is now also on sale at Amazon.com. 

Looking and Playing in Space now in paperback

I am pleased to announce that Looking and Playing in Space, my translation of Regards et jeux dans l'espace by modernist Quebec poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, is now in paperback.

The book is available by print-on-demand from Lulu.com, which is publishing it on behalf of Principled Press of Toronto, Canada (my own imprint). 

UPDATE: The book is no longer available on Lulu, but can be ordered through Amazon.com. 

Order Looking and Playing in Space at Amazon.com. 

As always, readers of  The Penny Blog may continue to read the whole of Looking and Playing in Space for free on the blog -- just click  here:

Read Looking and Playing in Space on the blog.

How to section added to Penny's Poetry Pages

I've had substantially less free time this week, and the little I've had I've been spending mainly working on the new Penny's Poetry Pages wiki. So I don't have a poem tonight. I decided to write about new developments on the wiki instead.

One part of the wiki that has recently been put together is our How to section: 37 (and counting) articles on topics ranging from How to analyze poetry to How to write a villanelle.

While many of the articles sound aimed at a teenage readership, going on about class assignments and such, I don't think that's a negative in any way. If it gets some new people reading the wiki, that's great; and I don't think the slant will stop anyone else from reading any of the articles, or from profiting from the ones they do read.

A real plus, in my eyes, is that none of the articles duplicate Wikipedia content. 36 of them come from an online How-to wiki (that anyone can edit, all contents Creative Commons) called WikiHow, while I wrote one (on writing metered verse).

If you're interested in looking at the section, here is the link:

http://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_-_topics

Poet biographies by George Dance

I have been planning to write biographies of some of the poets featured on The Penny Blog for some time, and during April and May I have been doing just that. I found the perfect venue for them – Wikipedia – and over the two months I wrote (meaning I either wrote from scratch, or rewrote from the bottom up) almost 100 articles on Wikipedia, mainly on Canadian poets.

However, despite the user-friendliness of the Wikipedia medium, the friendliness of the Wikipedia community is another thing. Half a dozen of its editors objected to my including reciprocal links from the articles to the poems in The Penny Blog (calling them 'spamming' and me a 'spammer'); three or four of those began cutting those and other links out of my articles; two of those went so far as to interfere with my own posting.

Fortunately I have found a more congenial vemue: Wikinfo. Wikinfo is a smaller encyclopedia which began as a fork from Wikipedia. (Forks from Wikipedia are created when someone disagrees with one of Wikipedia's five pillars, and Jim Wales tells him to "Fork off.") Besides the difference in size -- Wikipedia is far larger and much more bureaucratic -- there are some differences in policy. The one I appreciated, for my project, was Wikinfo's policy of letting me post my biographies as signed articles, which no one can edit but me.

People are allowed to copy my articles -- Wikinfo licenses its text under Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation licenses, like Wikipedia, but as a default rather than something compulsory as with the latter. Others may also alter the copies they make. However, no one besides me has a right to alter the signed copy at the Wikinfo site. Wikinfo users may all edit the unsigned copy of the article, one of which will be posted for each signed article.

On The Penny Blog, a link to the poet's biography (when written) will be added to that poet's poems, at the bottom of the post. You can see the format in the poems of the two poets so linked so far: Bliss Carman and Archibald Lampman. Others' biographies will follow as quickly as possible. Penny and I hope that you will enjoy reading them. 

Update, August 1, 2024 - It has been 13 years, and the poets' bios have migrated again, but this page is still getting the occasional reads; so I decided to mention the new links here. You can find the bios at Penny's Poetry Pages wiki, https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/About_poets_-_topics.  (Bios of individual poets, linked on each poem, now direct to this site.)

April 2011 Introduction / George J. Dance

April

Volume  II * 2011

Publisher:  The Penny Blog 

Editor: Penny

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough. [...]
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
           Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Spring" (from Second April)

Sorry, Edna, but Penny and I beg to differ. We kinda like April's babbling and flowers. In fact, that's one of the reasons we named our own little collection of babbling and flowers, April magazine, after it. Admittedly, a more important reason was that April is also National Poetry Month in both Canada and the United States; and the original idea for the magazine was to do something special that month.

What we do is bring you contemporary poetry. Unlike the usual focus of The Penny Blog (overlooked or neglected great work from the past, past enough to be into the public domain here in Canada), for April we publish work by authors who are currently living and writing.

April aims at showing  the diversity of contemporary verse.  We run the full gamut -- and what a gamut it is -- of today's poetry: structurally, from songs to formal verse to open forms to prose poems; thematically, from nonsense to love to death; experience-wise, from beginners to masters with years of practice. There is indeed a wide and wonderful world of poetry online, and we hope that April gives some indication of it.

We tried a couple of new things this year. One was to limit to 15 poets, and give every writer two poems. We held to that as best we could: but there were just too many good writers, too many good single poems, to do it completely. So that was only a partially realized vision; but we think the end result is better for it.

The second initiative was to look for and feature Creative Commons-licensed poetry sites. CC is a great initiative we applaud, perhaps the only way to reconcile the traditional ideas of copyright with the demands of the information age. Some of our blog's non-public domain work is CC-licensed, and we hope to have more of that in future. In the meantime, we are more than happy to promote other CC-using poetry sites.

But that's enough babbling for now. It's time to go look at this year's flowers.

Counting down Penny's Top 100

      For the next ten days, I'll be taking a short break from posting poetry. I need one. I've posted a poem every day for the past two months, with great results in attracting new readers to The Penny Blog.  Penny and I wish to assure those new readers, and our other regulars, that there will be no shortage of poetry to read over this time. Here is what we will be doing:

      Those who know me know that I'm a chart person; I have been since I was a lad, sitting at the transistor copying down the top 40 every Saturday. Last May I began making a chart here – Penny's Top 20 – covering the most-read poems on  The Penny Blog each month; the idea being to bring new titles to readers who might be unfamiliar with them. That idea included a Top 100 of the year in January, a time that has now arrived. 

      I expect, though, that merely giving a list of 100 poems would cause many readers to just skim, or even skip, it. That's what I'd do. And so we're going to count it down, just like a top 40 station. Each day for the next ten days, we will present a live-linked list of ten poems, starting with 91-100 and finishing with 1-10 in ten days. 

      Readers are encouraged to pick one poem from the ten, click through, and read. I hope that each list has at least one new poem for everyone. If you find and would rather read an old favourite, though, that is fine with us. Our only hope is that  you enjoy the countdown. 

Stevens' "Esthetique du Mal" coming in October

A unique feature of The Betty Blog is its long, multi-part poems each posted in installments over a month, readable as one piece (via that month's archive) or as individual pieces. Since we debuted last December, three such have appeared: the original Betty (now officially "Betty or Betty's Hat"), Betty's OS (in both text-only and the new Enhanced Edition), both by me; and Wallace Stevens' magnum opus, Notes on a Supreme Fiction. October is reserved for one more long poem, and Betty and I have finally picked one.

What decided us was the recent breakout success of Stevens' Notes. In August the Notes archive hit 34 reads. Adding readers who viewed individual pages increases that number to 63; more than two reads a day, enough to make it the #2 most-read feature that month. Several other Stevens poems enjoy consistent double-digit readership and top-ten placement every month.

Why the boom? I suspect a big factor is the copyright status of  this poet in Canada, one of the few remaining  English-speaking countries in which the copyright term for literary works expires 51 years after the author's death. Stevens' poetry is public domain here, but (because it is still copyrighted in the U.S. and Europe) is not already available all over the web. The Betty Blog may have the only complete version of Notes on the web.

The October entry also may be a Betty Blog exclusive: Stevens' "Esthétique du Mal". We decided to go with a second Stevens to give the new Stevens readers something extra, and to attract more if possible by offering something else not widely available (if at all).

Since Esthétique has only 15 parts, the Blog may publish only on alternate days next month; or we may publishd half-stanzas daily. No decision has yet been made. (If you have a preference, you can tell us in the Comments section.) In whichever form it appears, we hope you will enjoy the poem as much as we have.

Enhanced "Betty's OS" coming in August

A new version of "Betty's OS" (which was published on TBB in June) will be here in August. To be titled "Betty's OS 2.0" (BOS2.0), it is the first Enhanced Edition of a Bettywork. (Enhanced Editions are planned for all past and future Bettyworks).

The work has been significantly lengthened. I've added 326 lines to the original 770, to bring the total over 1,000 lines. Those changes, though, do not justify a second posting; in fact, I've already edited the June postings to add the new lines (just as I did with the later revisions to "Betty's Hat" in the December archives).

The change in BOS2.0 is that the software names are now all live-linked: Clicking on a name brings one to a page on the net (most often a Wikipedia page) with information on that operating system.

Just as "Betty's Hat" was seen, by some, as not a poem or anti-poem but a list of colours; so "Betty's OS" has been seen by some as not a poem or anti-poem but a list of operating systems. BOS2.0 is an attempt to popularize the work among that demographic. It is already the longest list of operating systems (that I know of) on the net: its 2,185 entries dwarf the 1,187 currently listed at the Operating Systems Documentation Project, and the notes will make it even more valuable to those interested in such things.

I hope that, even for those uninterested in OS lists, the enhancements will add value to the work; they'll be a reason to come back and rummage around in it (the way it's intended to be read).

90-95% of the names are already linked; a few more may get done, but (due to diminishing returns) I do not plan to go for 100%. Whatever is linked Aug. 1, is what gets blogged that month.

Welcome to April

April

Volume  I * 2010

Publisher:  The Penny Blog 
Editor: Penny

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Welcome to April.

Welcome to the first  issue of April magazine, meant to be an annual journal of internet poetry. Published by  The Penny Blog, edited by Penny herself, April brings a sample of what’s new on the Web, on usenet and groups, and in the blogosphere.

April is named for the month of April, which is National Poetry Month in Canada (established in 1999 by the League of Canadian Poets) and the United States (in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets). The poems of April are published on  The Penny Blog over the course of the month.

The idea of April was conceived this past January; the original goal was 15 poems, meaning publication of one every second day throughout April 2010. The response exceeded expectations, as the 27 poets and more than 30 poems in this volume attest. Some were poems requested from my or Penny’s favourites; others were from favourite authors, but chosen by the author; still others were submitted cold by authors I didn’t know.  Penny made a deliberate decision to publish as much of everything as possible.

No attempt was made to define or dictate what “poetry” is or should be. Rather, the goal was to show the diversity and variey of poetry on the internet. There is diversity in forms, from traditional forms to free verse to concrete verse and even prose; diversity in skill level, from professionals to hobbyists to beginners; and an absolute diversity of subjects and styles.

Because of this variety, my expectation is that no reader will like every poem in April. My hope is that every reader will like more than one, and will strongly like at least one. 

My long-term hope is that April will become a recurring annual event (and that eventually there will be a print version generating revenue and collecting royalties). For now, as in the future, the magazine can be read for free on  The Penny Blog: Volume I is now archived and future volumes will be treated similarly.

I hope you enjoyed 2010 National Poetry Month, and wish you many more of them to come. Penny and I hope that you make April an integral part of that annual celebration in the future.

George Dance
Publisher,  The Penny Blog 
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

To read Volume I, click here:
http://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

Call for Submissions

I've been thinking about where I want to take  The Penny Blog now that I've finished posting "Penny." What I'd like to do is to publish poetry on it; but not all mine.

I've started publishing more obscure, less-web-accessible poetry by Wallace Stevens, preparatory to putting up his "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" in February and "The Man With the Blue Guitar" in March. (I posted Supreme Fiction onto usenet last April as my National Poetry month [NaPoMo] project, and I plan to do the same with Blue Guitar this April.)

But I'd like to get more of a variety than that. So after taking care of Stevens I'll be looking at other hard-to-find-on-line favorites of mine in the public domain. As well (and here's the big news):

I'd be interested in publishing poems by other internet poets, if others want to submit them. I can't and won't pay anything, but it will give you a new venue, and something else to put on the cv. (In turn, having  The Penny Blog on some cv's can only help increase its profile.) And, of course, you will retain copyright; all you're giving me is a one-time usage.

For my part, I reserve the right to be selective; and only publish the poems I think are good enough to be there with the public-domain reprints. But that doesn't mean I want only one type; I'd like as much variety as possible.

If you're interested, please mail your poem(s) to
georgedance04@yahoo.ca.

If any come in quickly, I'll consider putting them on now in January -- February and March are reserved for Stevens' two long efforts only -- but I'm thinking the best thing for me to do is to roll out all the new poems over the month of April, as this year's NaPoMo project.

How do you handle a problem like Betty?

Lest the title be misunderstood, I should start by saying it's meant as a reference to the late great Richard Rodgers. "Betty" itself is not a problem. I'm quite happy with the poem (or non-poem) that has been written, annotated, and blogged; what I wanted to do I did. As a bonus, all of the reactions from readers have so far been quite positive.

Now that that's done, though, it just leads to the actual problem: How do I get readers to look at it? It may be the Best. Poem (or Non-Poem). Ever. -- but that doesn't mean much if almost no one has heard of it, much less seen it. So I have to find ways to attract other potential readers.

My first idea was to get The Betty Blog 'monetized' (ie, to start carrying google ads), so that it would start appearing on google's web and blog search engines. That was accomplished as well, though so far it's been of little help. I noticed today that the blog now has 278 'page impressions', which is pitiful. (In contrast, the articles I've written and posted since my last post here have picked up more than 1,600).

Meanwhile, the blog has dropped way down in Web search, and I can't even find it any more in Blog search. I think the problem there is merely that I didn't write anything here for 10 days. So I am going to have to write more here -- one of my reasons for blogging this column.

The other reason for the column, of course, is to ask my readers for other ideas to publicize the blog. So far all I've done, aside from the search engine bit, is to put announcements on my usenet and Google poetry groups and in my one social networking site, The Artists Project.

I've been considering joining other social networking sites, but I'm a bit hesitant. I still remember, a year or so ago, when about half my co.'s workforce had suddenly gone onto facebook; it was all they talked about and seemingly all they did. I'm hesitant about getting into anything high-intensity like that.

Any other ideas, please let me know. I'm open to all suggestions.

Announcing the Betty Blog

Recently I completed a 1,500-line poem, "Betty." The purpose of this blog is to archive the entire piece on the web. Later it will carry news about the poem, if any.

I wrote the first draft of "Betty" on Nov. 24, as an 11-line spoof of someone else's "poem." A third poet replied, with a 70-line version; and things snowballed from there. The final version, comprising 1,528 lines, was completed Dec. 12.

While writing "Betty," I also completed "Betty's Appendix." The appendix gives the hexadecimal values for (most of) the more than 3,000 colours mentioned in the poem.

Since I doubt there will be many readers at the beginning, I will be posting the entire poem and appendix in reverse order, starting with the last part of the Appendix and ending with stanza 1 of the poem. That may make things a bit confusing for those reading it as it's being posted, but it will make it easier to read for anyone coming to it after the fact.

So, without further ado, let me post the first (actually the final) installment of "Betty's Appendix". Further posts will follow each day until early January.

Update, April 11, 2011: Because someone claims that the use of the name "Betty" in a poem infringes his copyright, the name of the poem was changed to "Penny (or Penny's Hat)", the name of the appendix to "Penny's Appendix", and the name of the blog to "Penny's Poetry Blog" or maybe just "The Penny Blog". I haven't decided which as of this date.