Many thanks for accepting the interview. Tell us, when and why did soypoeta.com begin?

Soypoeta began in 2001, when my friend Carlos Mas and I brought together the things we liked most, web development and our passion for poetry. We saw that there was nothing like it on the internet, that if you were a poet you had no way of reaching people. We decided to create a specialised portal for poetry and we have been growing ever since. Carlos left the project due to a lack of time, I continued, and in 2010 I begin to think about how I could develop into a business project what had until then been exclusively for leisure. Looking at the IT panorama, the best thing I could see to do was to make a social network that would allow all poets to have a free and open opportunity to develop their poetic activity. 

I thought about how to transform the web page into a social network. I completely changed the portal and it went from being something totally static to something dynamic. On the 4^th of October 2011 we inaugurated the social network and a year later we have more the 2500 poets and 6000 poems published. We believe that we have achieved the objective of fostering the writing and reading of poetry, something that has, since the beginning been our reason for being.

In your opinion, and based on your experience, what do you believe is necessary for all poets to have?

First of all you have to do something very personal, something for yourself, and then you realise that many people have needed something like this but perhaps never thought to express it.  

Everybody has a poet inside them and perhaps the only thing that is missing is for them to stop and get and writing. Soypoeta.com is a social network that can serve many people, maybe even give them the necessary push to bring out the inner poet.

Is Soypoeta.com a social network directed uniquely at Spanish poets, or is it open to all Spanish speaking poets?

It is open to all. One of the objectives of Soypoeta.com, besides encouraging reading and writing of poetry, and shaking up the poetic scene, is that it should be a cultural bridge between Spain and Latin America.  In the first stage of Soypoeta, before it was a social network, the majority of the poems were arriving from South America. Poetry is international, Castellano is international, the internet erases frontiers and this allows half the registered poets on Soypoeta to be Spanish and the other have to come from Hispanic America. The beautiful thing about the social network is that it allows poets from here to go there, and vice versa, to meet people with whom you share the same passion for poetry, this way creating a relationship that goes beyond normal tourism.

Do you manage soypoeta.com on your own? Do you have collaborators?

I have IT support and collaborators that help me with content, the cinema blog, literary criticism, etc…

I had the luck to receive a grant from the Ministry of Culture which is a good boost and will allow us to remodel and improve the functionality of the page. I think that we will be ready to launch the new “improved” version for March of 2013.

What does soypoeta.com offer a poet?

Soypoeta is a medium of communication and there it has a Poetry Social Network. As a medium of communication, it offers cultural information specialised on poetry. Daily current news, contests, events, festivals… It also offers specialised directories of dedicated poets, libraries, editorials or new publications.

As for the Poetry Social Network, it offers any user the possibility to create a free profile. The people who register on soypoeta.com are poets, editors or poetry lovers. You can publish your poetry, including videos, photos etc., if you want to do it in a professional way. You can create discussion groups, and you have the opportunity to contact other users. But the most important thing is that you share your writings with the others and everybody can comment and give their opinion about your poems; in this way innumerable conversations about poetry can be created.

Registering on soypoeta.com gets you a personal webpage, a window to the world, as a poet. 

Do you have agreements with editorials to publish the most well-known poets?

We don´t have any official agreements, for some time we have been in contact with the creators of Bubok, a very important platform for self-publishing in Spain. With them we are thinking of making a book of the 20 or 30 most interesting poets that we have seen on soypoeta.com over the past year. 

Now we are going to create a publication with Bubok based on the “Poems to the Editor” initiative, a project born of Ángel Rodríguez, a user of the Poetry Social Network. Ángel created, within a group discussion about social poetry, a discussion called “Poems to the Editor” where he asked users who wrote poems with social themes, about solidarity or related with the moment of crisis that were are living through, and encouraged them to then send the poems to the editors of the national newspapers.

When I saw the project I spoke with Ángel and together we tried to get it out there as much as we could, so we created a logo, developed some aims, and draughted a newsletter that was sent out to all the important national newspapers and it was a success of participation.

The aims of the project were three: To write a poem; Send it to the editors of the newspapers asking for them to be published on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day; And then to publish it on the Poetry Social Network, where all the poems will be compiled for a book and the benefits of the sale will go to the RAIS Foundation, a foundation that combats social exclusion.

What legal form does soypoeta.com currently have?

Soypoeta right now belongs to the Soy Cultural Y Technología Company, which like any company looks for ways to maintain itself. Currently we receive a grant from the Ministry of Culture and we have some banner ads of interested companies, but we are always looking for support, grants from business that may be interested in our project and the kind of users that we attract.

We are looking for foundations, publishers, spaces for book selling, etc. people who believe in our project and in the importance that poetry can have thanks to their support. Every day in every city there are festivals or presentations of poetry, generating a lot of movement. Poetry is rising in value.

What are you reading now or what do you have in mind to read next?

I am constantly reading the poems published by users on the social network. I am surrounded by poetry. I am constantly receiving, buying and going to poetry events.

The compilations of poems from our generation interest me, young people who are beginning to make a name for themselves. Right off I can point to four anthologies of recent publication: “Anthology of Contemporary Poems “Umpteenth Sheet” (Cuadernos del Laberinto, 2012), “This doesn´t rhyme. Anthology of Poems of Indignation” (Editorial Origami, 2012), “Where Has the Poetry Gone” (Baile del Sol, 2012), or “12+1 An Anthology of Current Madrileño poets” (Endymion 2012). 

You have been with soypoeta for more than 10 years, do you have any advice for all those people who write but don´t know where to go from there?

I don´t have a very definitive opinion of poetry.

The simplest poems or the “poems of my mother type” poems, written in clear words, plain language, direct, which can seem a little stupid, are often the poems that receive the most responses and reactions.  Then you see poems by Nobel Prize winners, totally impenetrable, that nobody understands, and that are left in a vacuum. The important thing in poetry is to convey something.  There are people who are prepared to read, let´s say, more inscrutable poems. But everybody is ready to ready some type of poem. There are many important poets who are easy to read.

Certain poets convey a lot, they make you understand their feelings, those emotions that you have but don´t know how to define, and in just one poem, suddenly, you can see yourself reflected. Often poetry is like psychoanalysis.

Beyond that, I don´t give advice because each has his own tastes.

I can give advice to people who want to undertake a cultural project. I have been a cultural manager for 12 years and the basic thing to begin with is to have a dream and go for it, work hard and write down everything thing that comes into your head. A project needs a business plan, not until you have sat down to write it do I recommend that you start any project.

At the beginning of soypoeta we talked about poetry, cinema, literature, concerts, exhibitions…it was very generic. Then I realised that I was losing time talking about all of this, when there were already many portals centred on these subjects. And I, on soypoeta, was only dedicating crumbs to what really interested us: poetry and poets. I focused on that and now, if you go to soypoeta, we see that it only talks about poetry.

 Ah! And you have to be bold too!

What is it like to be a cultural entrepreneur in Spain at this moment?

Being an entrepreneur in the cultural sector today is complicated, but I suppose it would be the same in any sector. In the cultural field, beyond the outrageous increase in VAT, we are going through a tough phase of cuts and scarce investment. But I believe that Spain is a country of possibilities and what is needed is to offer something that doesn´t exist, to be a pioneer.

Beyond the economic expectations, we endeavour to fulfil a dream, which in our case is to foment the reading and writing of poetry. Now we have to combine our dedication to soypoeta with other work, but in a while, when the wallet opens, we will be well positioned to earn a living doing what we like most and have invested so much time into.

To conclude I want to thank The Art Boulevard for helping us to spread poetry and in particular that of soypoeta.com, and we wish you lots of luck in your project.

Guillermo Sporttorno Giner