It's funny, I get so hung up on the potential for bad behavior on the Internet that I often forget how liberating in a positive sense it can be. We get to share passions that we may feel discouraged in sharing in everyday life (poetry, in your case; in my case, myself (just kidding (kind of))), and you're right, we don't have to worry about how our physical representation colors how we're perceived. I have less of a problem with this in real life, since there's very little about my presence that's imposing. Sounds like kind of an awesome problem to have, actually.

Re. The difficulty finding people in real life to talk to in acceptable terms about poetry vs. relative ease online: I have a couple close friends from college who a) bent all their academic willpower towards loving/understanding/crafting good poetry and b) put some of their most beautiful thoughts into poetic form during that time. To the best of my knowledge, neither of them now has anything to do with poetry. Seems like with poetry more than any other art form, there's this tendency for real-world interactions/expectations to smooth out every creative wrinkle, and to re-direct that energy into more, what, "acceptable" applications? I have no idea why. But you hear a lot of people say things like "I want to be a writer," or "I want to be a musician." You seldom hear "I'm gonna be poet-laureate." People get out of school and suddenly that side of their life seems to just languish in a way we don't generally expect our passions to languish. Sports? Fine to talk about sports. Visual art? Sure, there's a marketplace for that. Poetry? Where does it go?

Of my two poet friends, one writes for a hotel-reviewing blog and the other edits an agricultural publication. Something about this is heartbreaking to me- not that they had to settle, because who doesn't, but that there are so few ways for people to leverage that passion into real-world interactions. I like to think that at least one of them (the better poet of the two) still secretly writes volumes in his spare time, and that the world's a better place for that output, whether it knows it or not.

Hell, maybe they've found their own messageboards.

This went off on a tangent. Can't remember my original point and there's little way to navigate back to it, as I'm typing on an iPad which, for all of the hype is an incredibly unintuitive word-processing device and seems by design to be fundamentally incompatible with my thought-process. Was I talking about the Internet? Poetry? Waffles? Dog grooming tips? No idea. Thanks, technology.