The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad for life, mad for talking, mad for poetry.
The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars… (Jack Kerouac reference from On the Road)
Mad for Poetry is a website for people who are interested in or passionate about poems, poets, and poetry.
The site was started in 2016 by David Evans and Samantha Emily Evans as a father-daughter challenge to see if one could make a living from poetry, as well as an attempt to get more people to love poetry.
Samantha originally collaborated with Vera Linder to host the magazine Poesia Poetry Journal, a bilingual poetry journal created to make poetry dangerous and alive, once again. After a while, Samantha and Vera became distracted trying to build their publishing careers and no longer had time to work on the journal.
Three years later, Samantha decided to quit her career in publishing and become a freelance writer and publicist at her own site LiteraryPixie. She decided publishing wasn’t her career, it was her passion. She didn’t want to follow the rules of corporate mainstream publishing, she wanted to play. She wanted to be mad for poetry without wondering, “Who’s gonna pay me?”. Plus, after nine years involved in the poetry community, she had already come to terms with the fact that poetry was a niche interest, especially for people her own age, and was considered charitable work rather than a for-profit entertainment industry.
And so Samantha returned to Mad for Poetry and with the support of her father David has a vision. It’s the same vision Samantha and Vera had in 2016, to make poetry alive again.
The world needs another literary renaissance, and Mad for Poetry is going to organize the rebirth.
We are looking for collaborators, writers, poets, and dreamers.
Drink wine & dream with us.
xoxo,
Mad for Poetry