standard 5.5" x 8" 10-pt laminated cover 233 pages

Introduction: A Family of Friends
introduction by Ron Carnell
December 2000

Little did I know, in late November, 1998, the impact those words would eventually have on my life and, to a lesser extent, the lives of several million others. Nor, at the time, do I think I fully realized their intrinsic truth.

It all started as a lark. The words above were penned and posted on the Internet, at a new web site called Passions in Poetry, along with a score of poems I'd written throughout some thirty years. Almost as an afterthought, I invited others to join me, to send me their hearts etched into words, and I would post their poetry beside my own. It began as a small trickle, one poem here, two more the next week, and I usually added them to the web site within a few hours of receipt. By the end of December, as 1999 was approaching, my poems had been joined by twenty-one others, a lovely handful in each of our five poetic categories.

January 3, 1999, is the official birthday of Passions. That was the day I registered the netpoets.com domain and moved our growing poetry collection to a new web server from a subdirectory on my personal site. We had 151 visitors the day I registered the new domain, a record high for us. In the process of moving the site, I also added nearly a thousand classical poems, from 75 of the greatest English speaking poets, and put together a new Greeting Card section. By the first week in February, we were up to 376 daily visitors and I was ready to add the nearly seventy new poems submitted during our first month of official existence.

As I write these words today, nearly two years after our humble beginnings, we have several thousand poems on the main site and tens of thousands available in our very active forums. Visitors are no longer measured in the hundreds, nor even in the thousands, as we now consistently welcome over a million new people to Passions every single month. The numbers are staggering, the growth phenomenal.

In The Beginning

Passions, however, has never really been about numbers.

When I retired in 1997, returning home after a twenty year absence, it was to spend time with my mother. Dad had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and I felt she would need my support. She didn't, of course, because she was much stronger and braver than any of us ever gave her credit for, but it made me feel better to think she might. Dad died in August, 1997.

Life, they say, is what happens while we're busy making arrangements for what we hope will happen. The best things in life are rarely planned, and few of us have the foresight to see the worst. Or, perhaps, we just don't have the courage. On August 24, 1998, one year and seventeen days after losing Dad, my mother died.

Passions in Poetry was born almost exactly three months after burying Mom, and I suspect the timing was no accident. I spent the first month after her death coming to grips with my anger. I spent the second month dealing with my grief. And the third month, the month that led to the creation of Passions, was spent battling my loneliness. In retrospect, I think I turned to my poetry because, throughout my life, only it had ever offered me a path to understanding.

Passions in Poetry has never been about numbers. It is, instead, about understanding. For me, at first, it was about self-understanding. I found I could not write about my mother, so turned to my older poetry trying to find solace. Posting it on the web was a whim, asking others to join me an afterthought, but using verse as a journey towards understanding was nothing new. I had been doing it my whole life. The Internet only made it more public.

And then a strange thing happened.

As others sent me their poetry to post, I discovered it often would offer a unique insight into their lives. These weren't yet friends, weren't people I had met in "real" life, but I found myself touched by their words. Some wrote to share their talent, some to share their pain or joy, but whatever else they meant to share, each inevitably shared a large part of their life. There is an openness to poetry, and often a vulnerability, that cannot be found in any other medium. Red Smith claimed writing was easy. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." What he didn't say was that it's not blood that flows from that vein, nor even blood-soaked words, but rather the foundation and meaning of one person's life. You discover their motivations, discover what they most value, discover what they most fear and abhor. They may try to lie, both to themselves and to us, but the lies are always revealed as secret truths. The life that flows from the opened vein can never be long obscured.

Read the words of a poet and you find understanding. First about them, then about humanity, and finally - about yourself.

If there is magic in poetry, it's because there is magic in understanding the heart of another. The people I have met through Passions are often more real to me than those I've known my whole life. Through the words of our poets, I have experienced their joys, their pains, their triumphs and failures. I have personally felt their hearts break, and I have secretly walked beside them as they discovered new love. I have used their eyes to see the beauty of a child, their ears to hear the sting of misplaced hate. I have laughed, I have cried. Through their words and imagery, I have lived their lives and glimpsed into their souls. I understand them. And, through them, I better understand myself.

Voices on the Web

Passions in Poetry isn't about numbers, and strange as it may sound, it really isn't even about poetry. It's about people and about understanding. Three years after retiring to take care of my mother, two years after her death, the web site and the people thus brought into my life have given me new purpose.

This book, the first collection of poetry culled from our extensive collection, is a small reflection of that purpose. Like Passions in Poetry, Voices on the Web is less about poetry and much more about understanding. It's our first collaborative book, the effort of many people, but it likely will not be our last. There is room in this world for more poetry, as the Internet proves every day, and there is certainly room for more understanding. Where there is understanding there will never be room for hate and bigotry. Understanding doesn't mean we will always agree and it doesn't mean we will always like each other, let alone live in brotherly love. But you cannot hate what first you fully understand. You can only accept.