Football Poets

EDITOR REPLY:

Re Editor response to Marketing Football Poetry comments/suggestions..

Hi

Re (stands back and gets ready to be shot down…..)
Thank you for your constructive criticism.
We don’t want to shoot anyone down..at least you responded!

All great points and goals. Are you offering to help? Do you have the sufficient technological knowledge and experience to help re-build the site just as you describe, in return for some payment from funds raised? Could you fulfil those suggestions and make it as economically vibrant as possible, whilst still retaining all the poems and making them available in a much more accessible way ..This wealth of poems, archived by the British Library needs to now chronologically be logged into exciting sections.

We’d love users to be able to shape-shift and change the appearance of the pages to their own taste/ style/ team etc?

We’d also love competitions, just like in the beginning (Kick It Out etc;) and of course a compilation book. Who remembers Swapping Shirts With Shakespeare the book project, which has been on the back-burner for years but never got further than a cover design ?

If so we desperately need you or anyone out there…and we’d love to have you on board and that’s exactly what the money we seek is for.

We have had great plans for years, but no money to achieve our goal. Largely because, like yourselves we have to work and live. This is always a voluntary spare-time thing. We have set up a Facebook page so that football poets can interact .Some are. If you are on Facebook please visit us… click Like and communicate your ideas and images at www.facebook.com/FootballPoets

We had to close down the guestbook after endless abuse from again a minority. A new one would of course be a log-in set up, whilst keeping the poem submissions not requiring one, in order to continue encouraging young and old alike to write freely.

t’s not some Clik and Crispin exclusive club. We want sections and a whole all-singing, all-dancing interactive site too. When the site was originally set up by our then webmaster Dave for fun in 2000, there were 5 or six football poets in Stroud. When Dave left, needing to fully concentrate on his own work, and with the site system already out-dated, we lost the facility to change anything at all . All we could and can do is edit-on poems and aid in correcting poor grammar wherever we could… without destroying or demoralising contributors efforts.
Excluding multiple spoiled rude entries, spam, or unsuitable/up-PC poems is all part and parcel..etc

We contact many of those who list real email addresses too. All we have left are our 3 little editorial sections.! That’s why you see pictures of those few of us that Dave chose to ut up initially , that have remained unchanged since 2000 and a workshop session from 2001.. also unchanged ! Why can’t we change those sections, because everything has moved on .It was built in a now very old-fashioned and in-compatible format

We saved the poems (built in asp) and managed (with Green Web’s wonderful help)and get them to house them (for now!) on to a Windows platform (believe me I’m not a techno wizard either)….

Clik and myself have taken some incredible flak down the years for keeping this site going. Encouraging people to read and write about something they love. If you read the SOS, we have been un-funded and looked after this site every day for 12 years. We have explained regularly at great length – that technologically, this is a very old antiquated site .We do not have access to all the sections, hence how out of date it is. Like some crumbling football ground but it remains popular – so we have somehow kept it going like a grass roots project.

We have approached football people but their remit is primarily coaching youth these days.

So yes. You are right that is all we can do. Post poems and create them for people to write on and in ( World Cup/ Olympics/ FA Cup/ New Season/ Nostalgia / Euros/ Hillsborough/ Munich/ Tributes/ Racism / History etc; ) First and foremost however we are poets and writers like you. We have also both struggled to keep ourselves going financially throughout personal illnesses and struggles..

No one in 12 years.. despite request, technologically minded, has come forward and offered to help , change or create a site for us which we estimate would cost today between £1000-2000 to put in place. We have managed to contain the 28,000 submissions somehow on our out-dated site. As explained any funds are for a rebuild .

Football Poets is a Not For Profit organisation. I have also received personal criticism, albeit from a selective few, for promoting supposed ‘self centred’ workshops and for spending long hours on trains for small recompense, going into schools and clubs in the past and encouraging writing through football. Those workshops, with the closure and resulting disappearance of most of the Government led Study Support Centres at football and sports grounds.. along with cuts in any funding to support such workshops , means we have not run a workshop for two years now. Believe me, although I turn 65 next year, I’m determined to re-do this site and keep it going. New blood and support would be brilliant.

Ethically, we have paid (out of our own pockets and with the support of three of four fellow football poets who post here)for our annual domain name fee and to be hosted by Green Web..and wish to move further into being even more environmentally friendly with a new site.

Your Thoughts?

best wishes -Crispin