The Story of DarkPoetry

The Birth

DarkPoetry is a thing born out of deep suffering, tempered by excess, and finally shattered into a thousand pieces: each shard handed out to another person to hold.

This  Dark Poetry was really born in Iowa circa 1982, in the form of a sincere promise within the traumatized middle-childhood mind of DarkPoet (Matthew), but it took quite a few years until its incubation was complete. 

It reached its first public gasp of expression in a website which was born on Geocities in 1996.  A handful of poets contributed their poems to the effort, which was started by Matthew.  The mission was unclear, but the compulsion to share cathartic poetry was profound.  The project continued for a couple of years with Matthew maintaining a poetry e-zine and bouncing the site from place to place.

The Rise of DarkPoetry

DarkPoetry.com was purchased in 1998.  Matthew never really expected it to ever even pay for itself, but he was rather caught up in all of the stories that members told him: about feeling that DarkPoetry was the last refuge keeping them from completely cracking up, that it was a life saving place where people could feel understood.  People even claimed that having DarkPoetry to support them gave them a reason to live.  And they meant it.

Matthew's mother may have her faults, but she always worked hard to impress upon him that he should live to change the world in a positive way.  So naturally, this sort of feedback made him feel like he was doing his life's work.  He began to think about what it would be like if everybody had a place to go to to semi-anonymously share their innermost thoughts and have a "second family" of sorts for support whenever their involuntary family gave out.  But it would require a lot more than just Matthew's contribution to make it a reality.

Through the 2000's, Matthew continued to build on that mission, and found that the struggle to make it financially sustainable would be huge.  Year by year the site showed modest increases in member support, but nothing even close to where it would need to be to create a proper non-profit or foundation to support this mission.

The Renaissance

In 2007, Matthew decided that to bring the community into a state whereby it could truly be self-sustaining and capable of serious growth, he would need to completely re-architect the software that ran DarkPoetry.  After a two year effort involving a lot of input from expert software engineers and endless hours of toiling, DarkPoetry's third major incarnation was born. 

Today DarkPoetry is under rapid expansion.  Matthew is investing massive amounts of time into turning DarkPoetry into an organization that can become his lifelong occupation.  Whether it succeeds or not is entirely up to you, the members of DarkPoetry.