Carol Rumens & the Birth of the Online Literary Commons

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Carol Rumens RIP (10 December 1944 – 25 April 2026, aged 81) was born in Forest Hill, South London, and died from a brain tumour. She studied Philosophy at the University of London and earned a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage from City College Manchester. She served as poetry editor for Quarto and the Literary Review, taught creative writing at the University of Kent, Queen’s University Belfast, and Bangor University, and wrote “Poem of the Week” for The Guardian for nearly twenty years. Her honours include Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1984), the Cholmondeley Award, and the Prudence Farmer Prize. Her poetry collections include Self into Song (2007), Blind Spots (2008), De Chirico’s Threads (2010), and Animal People (2016); she also published the anthology Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian “Poem of the Week” (Carcanet Press, 2019).

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by Phil Hall / Ishouldapologise

We all joined Carol Rumens on her Guardian thread, Poem of the Week. I participated for more than a year, and, at the end of it, Carol and The Guardian decided they would publish a compilation of all our poems, including a couple by me. This was back in 2007–2008.

Carol Rumens’ thread was important because it was partly from that thread that an online publishing proposal emerged called the Keiretsu Model, developed by Cheryll Barron. Cheryll and I got to know each other well. I have a copy of her book on the history of Napa Valley, Dreamers of the Valley of Plenty. She was a disembodied friend living in a cabin somewhere in the hills of California, on her own with the Pronghorn deer roaming outside.

There was a slight feeling of desperation to participation in Carol’s thread. We were all keen to write poems and to be heard, and Poem of the Week satisfied those needs. Carol engaged with us, and when she didn’t we engaged intensively with each other, writing poems in answer to other poems, giving our ‘honest’ opinions, bursting bubbles and having our own bubbles burst. Elsewhere in The Guardian, one writer said, “Whatever you do, don’t go to the thread on Carol Rumens’ page and read it,” We were rough and vicious, sometimes, no holds barred, but we were also perceptive and open and vulnerable.

We had only the merest suspicion that there were other poets and Guardian readers and writers who actually bothered with our threads. We were all on a kind of pilgrimage through poetry; experiencing through our interactions combinations of shared silences when no one answered, the mental exertion of composition, the contemplation of other people’s work, and feeling accompanied. Carol was tolerant, cagey, puzzled, and a little worried about the phosphorescence her weekly analysis released.

At the end of this process, and after writing quite a few poems, I asked Carol, this question, and I’m sure it’s a question many people who write poetry ask an established poet: “Am I actually a poet? Do I get the imprimatur?” She withheld it. And yet Lucy Newlyn, the former Oxford Professor, took one of the poems I wrote back then and placed it at the top of one of her discussion threads. I take that as mild vindication.

Synesthetic Fruit

Zapote negro is green-skinned and black-fleshed.
Mamey is heavy-headed and orange.
Guanabana makes a cooling white liquid.
Pitaya is from a cactus, multi-coloured; so bright.

One fruit is textured like a slick of uncracked petroleum.
The other forms a soft and synesthetic swirl.
Those seeds sleep snug in slippers of fruit lace.
These seeds, like Huichol beads, are ravelled on threads of light.

You went to Malaysia, Burma and Brazil.
You brought me back a milkshake as thick as my throat.
I spat you out with clicks and you fell in puffs of musk.
For me, you gave birth to spiders, iguanas and night.

Carol organised a poetry competition, and the winner would get a column in The Guardian. We all joined in. Of course, I thought my poem was best, but Billy Mills (despite the unfounded allegations of fraud levelled against him) won. Billy dedicated his life to poetry, so of course he was the right man for the column. He is an Irish experimental poet, founder and co-editor of the hardPressed poetry imprint, and was a regular contributor to The Guardian book blog from 2008 to 2016.

Some of us on the thread were not only obnoxious about poetry but obnoxious about everything, though we were quite clever with it. Others suffered from logorrhoea; yet others were doggy grateful for every mention. My own particular skill as Ishouldapologise was to draw everyone out into a discussion and build it into a kind of crescendo, so that at the end of the process, the thread read like a new art form. And I miss it.

The Keiretsu-Cooperative

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Out of that poetry thread and Cheryll Barron’s other reflections on technology over a long career, and her other experiments, came her proposal for The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for Post-Gutenberg Publishing, published as an Oxford Internet Institute (OII) Issue Brief (No. 4) in January 2010. Its core features included:

A profitable, cooperative publishing model centred on bloggers

Avoidance of pay-for-content risks via a “pay-to-own” scheme

Small subscriptions granting tiny stakes/shares in the cooperative, with voting rights and potential profit share

Designed to supplement or replace the advertising-dependent model

The OII brief featured responses from Bill Emmott (The Economist), David Goodhart (Prospect), Godfrey Hodgson (Reuters Foundation), and Frances Pinter (Bloomsbury Academic). One of the reasons Cheryll’s model was criticised was a lack of focus on “the ethics of content ownership.”

It was Georgina Henry, with support from Brian Whitaker and others, who managed and oversaw Comment is Free (Cif) and who acted as the driving force behind it. However, Cheryll Barron sent her Keiretsu-Cooperative proposal to Emily Bell instead. Bell was, from 2007 to 2010, Director of Digital Content for Guardian News & Media.

Clearly, Bell read Cheryll’s proposal. Shortly afterwards, The Guardian began experimenting with subscription and memberships. However, The Guardian’s version adopted only surface features in a truncated, far less democratic, more conventional and top-down form; without genuine co-ownership. Despite her intellectual generosity, Cheryll got no public attribution from Bell. Bell later left The Guardian in 2010 to become Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

Nowadays, nobody would mention a simple thread beneath a poetry blog, but we forget how important The Guardian’s experiment with reader comment was; how ground-breaking. Comment is Free was the pathfinder. This is just before social media really took off.

To my credit, perhaps, and embarrassment, I was one of CiF’s well-known protagonists under the name: Ishouldapologise. As Ishouldapologise, I was a frequent and provocative commenter on CiF. I ended up writing for them.

One of the earliest documented real-world gatherings of an online comment community tied to a major newspaper came about as a result of Linda Grant’s article revealing my connection to her friends, my parents. On 11 December 2007, there was a meeting of online souls at All Bar One, Dean Street, Soho, London. It was, according to Grant, a celebratory and successful first Cif meet-up where “old online enmities dissolved.” Those present included Phil Hall (Ishouldapologise), Cath Elliott (Mswoman), Biskieboo, Tigerdunc, Morning Star Man, Mikan, Snowy Mountain, and editors/writers: Georgina Henry (Cif editor), Linda Grant, Brian Whitaker and an editor from The New Yorker.

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At the end of the experience, like Cheryll Barron, I made a proposal. I was writing for The Guardian by then. I proposed to Brian Whitaker, one of the editors of the comment site as a whole, that we experiment with a new kind of approach to publishing online: a writer would come down from their pedestal into the thread. A question or title or subject would be raised, there would be an open discussion, the writer would participate, and subsequent to all the discussion, write up his or her article, incorporating as much or as little of that discussion into it. The discussion would be the starting point, and the article not the result of the isolated pontification; rather, the journalist would use the discussion as a starting point, and reference it.

Brian said this was too radical and new to implement. And yet the truth is this is what actually happened. Writers at The Guardian would often dip down into threads and participate, and you could see that the articles they wrote were sometimes inspired by online discussions. But they didn’t acknowledge it, and we thought much less of them for not giving a nod to the people who sparked off trains of thought.

Comment is Free allowed readers to argue with all sorts of public figures (like Richard Dawkins for example) ‘in person’, whereas before, you read and you shut up. But, in the end, The Guardian lost its nerve completely. Its talkboards closed suddenly on 25 February 2011; thread lives were reduced from three days to two days after relaunch (restored to three after reader objections) with the justification being ‘moderation resource point of view.’ A rightward shift followed: hosting right-wing commentators like Stephen Glover, who later moved to the Daily Mail. Another sign was the betrayal of Julian Assange after the WikiLeaks affair. The Guardian conducted a vicious and defamatory campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, endorsing Yvette Cooper in 2015 and publishing a warning about Corbyn from Tony Blair. This marked the end of the left’s engagement with The Guardian and the fragmentation of left media into many alternative online media outlets. The left’s disillusion with and abandonment of The Guardian really started in 2007, or earlier.

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The Poem of the Week thread continued until Carol’s death, but for me and Cheryll and others, the experiment ended in 2008. It ended, I think, with the death of one of the poets on the thread, called Steve. When he died, he had his poem published. He called his poems Flat-Pack Poems. In one, he mentioned all of us. Here is an extract from Steve Bailey’s Come the Revolution

The first thing they’ll do is, they’ll jail all the poets,
The free-versers, free-cursers, go-with-the-flowets,
Sad tree-huggers, mad buggers, plods and emoters,
Those limerick loonies and I’ll-get-my-coaters,

De-dum, de-dum merchants, the ones who can’t spell,
The nuts who write epics on heaven and hell,
The angries, the Musies, the minimalists,
Declaimers who froth at the mouth and shake fists,

The delicate flowers on a spiritual high,
Unspeakable egotists, pregnant with “I”,
The ones who write verses in praise of their dogs,
Back-of-an-envelope types with crap blogs,

The ones that on reading inspire you to think,
The ones you daren’t read lest they drive you to drink,
The beardies, the weirdos, the hermits in caves,
Radical poets who fail to make waves,

The rhymers, good timers (and good-timers too),
The ones you can’t read unless feeling quite blue,
The ranters, the ravers, the cravers of fame,
The ones only published because of their name,

The naturists (naturists? Not them in the buff;
The greeters of tweeters and all that there guff),
Outdoorsers who chronicle beauty in midges,
Modernists copying notes left on fridges,

The adjective addicts and those who use none,
Depressive metricians, those just having fun,
War poets, poor poets (wholesale and retail),
Those who describe anatomical detail,

Cynicalsteve, August 2008

Before he died, Steve took strange umbrage at one of my poems and angrily forced me to explain its meaning to him. It was a poem I had written after my mother’s death. Many people start to write poetry after a death, a break in a relationship, or some important life event. Anyway, the poem for me was heavy with meaning, but Steve for some reason thought I was pulling his leg. It was only later we realised he had cancer and was about to die. The poem, I suppose, was triggering for him; it was about death.

In your last missives to Tanzania you said
“Our son is going completely wild.”
I lead my brothers into an abandoned stockade
And we steal cooking apples.
Laughing, you said,
“You know, last night, I dreamed I had the answer.
I woke your father up and said, ‘It’s a banana,’
Then went back to sleep.”
Look. I hold this orange near you.
Love is blind like this orange.
And I wave its scent towards you,
Hoping you will smell blossoms.

But those threads under Carol Rumens poetry articles were about everyone being heard on an equal footing, in the spirit of social media. Except that then the writing when it bubbled up from the bottom could go right up to the higher realms of professional writing on a newspaper thread. It doesn’t do that on social media.

Facebook hadn’t really kicked off in 2007. Facebook launched in 2004; public access in late 2006 with 100 million users by August 2008 and 1 billion users by 2012. Because of my experience with Poem of the Week and CiF, when Facebook came along, I decided to hold faith with the electronic medium and write for it. I write many articles and publish them on Facebook.

Cif and the poetry thread peaked precisely while Facebook and social media were emerging, but not yet inescapable. People were still deriding social media and boasting about how they never used it. Cif and the poetry thread were early experiments. Out of them came friendships, a book, a job, a publishing model, a glimpse into the future of social media, and an understanding of the tragedy, and glorious possibilities, of the online commons, and what we lose by these enclosures.

Ars Notoria

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Ars Notoria emerged directly out of this experience. In its original form, it was published when, in response to an article on Jacob Zuma, I submitted an article of my own appealing for more balanced reporting on the South African president. Subsequently, I was told that I was persona non grata and should publish elsewhere. The Guardian was taken to court by the South African government and had to pay a settlement fee.

In its current iteration, Ars Notoria is an online magazine, a fully realised publication with multiple contributors, monthly issues, and coverage of arts and politics. Our philosophy is Humane Socialism:

We have faith in human perception and intelligence rather than in mechanisms, no matter how sophisticated. We write under the banner of Humane Socialism. The arch enemy of humane socialism is the inhumane, embodied in the many forms of Malthusianism and social Darwinism, the philosophy and language of the colonialist, the exploiter and the conqueror.

We are aligned with Quaker testimonies—peace, sustainability, truth, simplicity, equality—and incorporate the idea of the inotic (coined by Tony Hall): wherever we go, we are the same human beings. Our editorial stance includes a willingness to critique both mainstream right and unthinking dogmatism from the Marxists, and regular betrayals by the soft left.

At Ars Notoria, collaboratively we hope we have built a publication that embodies the original principles of the early online commons. And in a real sense, Carol Rumens has a legacy in Ars Notoria; in our magazine we publish poets from all around the world.

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Phil Hall was born in South Africa into an ANC family with British, French, Austrian, and German roots. After his parents were exiled, they lived in East Africa and India before returning overland to the UK. In the UK he studied Russian and Spanish literature, politics, and economics. After graduating he specialised in descriptive and applied linguistics. Phil has lived and worked in Spain, the USSR, Mexico and the Gulf. Returning to London during the pandemic, he co-founded the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria (the Art of the Noteworthy) and the micropublisher, AN Editions.