Art murdered

Cimitero di Staglieno - Tomba Famiglia Appiani
Cimitero di Staglieno – Tomba Famiglia Appiani

Poets and Lovers exists since five years and a half. It is now the sole survivor of a group of four related sites. Those devoted to the artist Graham Ovenden and his Garage Press have definitively disappeared: Graham died on 9 December 2022, then nobody was responsible for maintaining these two sites, and after the person in charge of the technical management of the four sites disappeared, their domain names were not renewed. The domain name of Pigtails in Paint was also not renewed: according to a press release dated 9 March on its Facebook page, when the person in charge had gone, the Editor-In-Chief could not get complete access to the domain name, so the latter expired. He decided then to let the project sleep until he could get help from other people. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Nuit brune

Aleksandra Waliszewska
Aleksandra Waliszewska

Il y a 5 ans et 10 jours, Poets and Lovers paraissait sur la toile, après 3 jours de gestation. Depuis, le blog a surmonté des attaques, des tentatives de censure, des changements forcés d’hébergeur et des défaillances de la gestion informatique ; il reste debout, tandis que Pigtails in Paint, Graham Ovenden et Garage Press ont disparu, faute de continuité dans l’organisation. La solitude du site, visible à l’extérieur, se manifeste aussi à l’intérieur, où les commentaires se font rares et les collaborations et contributions restent inexistantes. La source des articles finit par se tarir. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Sleeping beauty

Sulamith Wülfing - Three angels
Sulamith Wülfing – Three angels – from Etsy

After 5 years and 5 days, this blog still lives, having recently overcome new obstacle. Earlier this year, the person in charge of the technical management of the four sites Pigtails in Paint, Poets and Lovers, Graham Ovenden and Garage Press faced a personal emergency and had thus to give up that work. The four sites fell into different hands. At the beginning of this month, the company hosting Poets and Lovers moved it to another server, but due to error in the update of DNS records, the site was unreachable. After correcting it, the security certificate was faulty and had to be replaced. Finally, the contents uploaded to the new server was from an earlier backup, so the latest posts and images were missing, I had to restore them; this was done 4 days ago. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Lonely Star

Darker than Black - A Wish Upon a Shooting Star
Darker than Black – A Wish Upon a Shooting Star

Poets and Lovers has lived four years and a half, longer than its predecessor Agapeta. Hopefully, it should no more be threatened by technical failures or attempts at censorship, but the main obstacle could now become the progressive drying of the poetical sources of its contents. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Full circle

Aleksandra Waliszewska
Aleksandra Waliszewska – from Frank T. Zumbachs Mysterious World

Poets and Lovers exists since 4 years, and this is its 427th article. It should go on for a 5th year, with more poems and songs presented at a regular frequency. Indeed, I am indebted to the collection Amours Enfantines by François Lemonnier for its many poems, mostly in French, devoted to the love of little girls; I discovered there many lesser-known authors. I have also collected a list of songs, mostly in English, about young girls. However, I lack poems in English, readers are welcome to propose some. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Indomitus

Robert Stevenson - Peggy Ann Garner dans Jane Eyre
Robert Stevenson – Peggy Ann Garner dans Jane Eyre (1943)

Poets and Lovers est toujours là, après 42 mois, ayant surmonté tous les obstacles sur son chemin. Le 20 avril, le registraire de nom de domaine Njalla (une compagnie fondée par des pirates informatiques), sous prétexte d’une supposée plainte contre Pigtails in Paint, bloqua les noms de domaine de tous les sites hébergés par notre fournisseur Internet. Celui-ci dut récupérer les codes pour transférer les domaines auprès d’un autre registraire. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

New flight

Gustave Moreau - La Péri: Rêve d'Orient
Gustave Moreau – La Péri: Rêve d’Orient (c1881) – from Art Renewal Center

Poets and Lovers lives since three years and a half, regularly facing threats. Our Internet provider had registered the domains of his sites with the domain registrar Njalla. On April 20, without any warning or explanation, Njalla decided to block the domain names of of all sites hosted by our provider, in particular Pigtails in Paint, Poets and Lovers and the sites of Graham Ovenden and Garage Press. Moreover, Njalla blocked our provider’s access to the virtual server that they hosted for his sites, they did not even allow him to download the latest contents before terminating it. The pretext was a supposed complaint against the contents of Pigtails in Paint, about which we have no details. After requests for information by our provider, they claimed “child porn,” then later “sexual objectification of kids.” They told him that he was “free” to move the domains to another registrar, but for several days, they refused to transmit him the authorisation codes for transferring the domains to another registrar. After a few days, Pigtails in Paint got its codes for registering the domain name with another company, but for Poets and Lovers it took a month to get the correct codes. The sites of Graham Ovenden and Garage Press had to change their domain names. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Trois ans de liberté

Richard Müller - Liebesbotschaft
Richard Müller – Liebesbotschaft (1921)

Poets and Lovers vit depuis trois ans, et c’est un petit miracle. Partout se met en place une censure « préventive » d’Internet, où divers opérateurs invoquent toutes sortes de raisons pour bloquer des sites, tandis que des lobbies réactionnaires avides de pouvoir et de subsides publics, sous couvert de « protection des enfants », exigent des opérateurs la censure de divers contenus qu’ils qualifient arbitrairement de « maltraitance d’enfants ».

Dans un climat de haine, de chauvinisme et de militarisme, Poets and Lovers continuera à défendre la poésie, la liberté et l’amour. C’est la seule voie pour faire apparaître le merveilleux dans nos existences. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…