The Wondering Minstrels
Between 1999 and 2007, with my friends Martin DeMello and Sitaram Iyer, I ran a poem-a-day mailing list with over 5,000 subscribers (a big number in those days!) - The Wondering Minstrels.
Every poem was accompanied by a brief critical analysis or personal commentary, initially written by Martin and myself, eventually written by hundreds of guest submitters. These prompted a lively, friendly discussion in the comments - memories of a different era of the internet!
The Minstrels featured in the MIT Technology Review, prompted articles with titles like “Can one be a fan of high art?” and “Never let schooling get in the way of your education”, and was the subject of a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation.
This microsite archives the poems and their accompanying commentaries. Poems are reproduced here under fair use.
Surprise me — a random poem
titles, poets, first lines and contributors
On this day
- Poems sent on this date between 1999 and 2006 appear here.
Browse
- By date — 1969 poems
- By poet — 755 poets
- By contributor — 428 guest contributors
- By theme — 61 themes
- By comments — 6203 comments
- By title
- By first line
Fun facts
- 1,122 of the 1,969 poems were guest submissions, sent in by 428 contributors. Readers left over 6,200 comments on the poems.
- At its peak, the Minstrels had a Google PageRank of 8 out of 10. The scale was logarithmic: CNN, Microsoft and Yahoo were 9s, and Google itself was a 10.
- The archive was first hosted at Rice University, where Sitaram was a graduate student. It used more bandwidth than the rest of the computer science department combined.
- Around 2008, Sitaram walked past some fellow Google engineers who had just computed the 50 most bookmarked sites on the web, and were puzzling over what this odd little site was doing on the list. They didn’t know its maintainer was standing right behind them…