So, How Should Poets Proceed?
Armed with your knowledge of what is and is not considered published, you’ve just got to pick your battles and act accordingly. For instance, most of my poems are not published on my blog, because I want to have as many publishing options available to me as possible. I share drafts of these “unpublished” poems with close poet friends to solicit feedback for revisions. The poems I post as parts of prompts, I consider “published,” though I would not use it as a publishing credit if I tried including any of them in a collection, because I also consider my poems on this blog to be “vanity publication credits.” I make an informed decision to write a poem a week just for the act of creation. Considering how much money most published poets make anyway, I don’t view this as such a bad decision. But every poet has to make this decision on their own.
