“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-Samuel Beckett
For 10 years (1999-2009) I ran a moderately popular website and mailing list called Metaroar - dedicated to spreading the word about poetry and live literature events and opportunities in London. It started as a bcc’d email to a group of people I bumped into back in the late 90s when I was making an effort to attend every poetry or spoken word event I could find. Someone always wanted to find out when the next gig was, so I took email addresses in exchange for a promise to keep people in the know. The first few hand-crafted messages went out from an AOL account (that has long since been mothballed), based on whatever I’d heard was up and coming. And it grew from there.
Fast forward a few years. The mailout spawned a website, with a direct email subscriber-base of over a thousand people, not to mention some fairly respectable web stats. No ad-supported revenue, no funding, just an hour or two a day, and some extra time at the top and tail of each week to research and queue content. I stepped back from Metaroar late 2009 (for a number of different reasons - that’s another blog post), though the site’s been available since then like an old, abandoned building. Yesterday, I turned off the life-support. The account that the site lived on was up for renewal, and it made no financial sense to maintain it. I archived databases and squirrelled through directories, Wordpress backups, defunct installations of forum software, orphaned pages and all the different versions of the site - wading through all the code that accumulated over the years. And really, it was like wandering through an old house I haven’t visited in years. Of course, the code, the data, doesn’t quite capture the ideas and vision that existed in between. They remain like ghosts.
Halfway through drafting this, it occurred to me that it’s an elegy of sorts. I learned a lot from running the site, beyond all the mechanical skills that came with managing a website, listings service and brand from top to bottom. And there’s another lesson here - something about letting go. I spend so much time bouncing from project to project, I (and when I say “I”, I’m also speaking to a bunch of people who share my particular array of type ‘A’ proclivities…) rarely allow myself the time to appreciate the significance of any individual enterprise - and if it’s tough to do that when I’ve got something right, it’s even harder to do that when I don’t think I’ve nailed it. I’d be lying if I said I’d made peace with what I’d hoped the project would achieve and I’ll admit, I still regularly think about setting something up in it’s place. All this time, I’ve kept a light on in the window, just in case I ever wanted to come back. But really, it’s well past time to move on.
