WAKING UP TO COFFEE AND ... SONNETS?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WAKING UP TO COFFEE AND ... SONNETS?
Internet Helps Find New Audience for Poetry

Washington, DC (May 16, 2000) - Alongside the b-to-b
exchanges, vertical communities, and other buzzwords, a
long-ignored content category is finding new life on the
Internet. No, it's not the result of a Hollywood
mega-merger. And it has more to do with roads diverging
than with the information superhighway.

In a word -- it's poetry.

The renaissance comes in the form of Poem-a-Day, a unique
daily service offered by DayTips.com
<http://www.daytips.com> and PoetryPreviews.com
<http://www.poetrypreviews.com>, which last week hit the
45,000-subscriber mark. The concept is simple. Each day a
growing number of Internet users, scattered across more than
75 countries around the world, receive a poem along with a
biography of the poet via e-mail.

Many subscribers don't know much about poetry at first. For
them, the selections and the bios are providing a day-by-day
immersion into the worlds of cummings, Keats, Bukowski, and
Bly: "Thank you for starting my day, pondering, with a smile
... and more enlightened than I was before," wrote one
American subscriber. Another sent an e-mail from Taipei,
where the daily verse had become part of the curriculum for
Taiwanese struggling to master English.

The advertising-supported service was created in early 1998
by Mickie Kennedy, a North Carolina native who earned an MFA
in Creative Writing at George Mason University before
deciding to take his poetry interests online. "Poem-a-Day
has really struck a chord with Internet users," Kennedy
mused. "Many of them are new Internet users, and this helps
them ease into using their computer -- they love getting
that daily poem when they log on in the morning."

Poem-a-Day's mix of well-known and newly-established poets
helps keep content fresh and readers -- everyone from poetry
novices to professional poets -- happy. Recently published
poets, for example, include 1995 Nobel Prize-winner Seamus
Heaney and LA Times Book Award laureate Carolyn Forché as
well as Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

For more information on poetry's migration to the Internet
content space, please see http://www.daytips.com or
http://www.poetrypreviews.com, or contact:

Mickie Kennedy
DayTips.com/PoetryPreviews.com
tel: +1 301 770-8554
mkennedy@poetrypreviews.com

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