Without looking, I’ll make a guess–it’s filled with people writing strictly rhymed and metered doggerel.
The older I get, the more I dislike “light” poetry. If it doesn’t have some heft to it, I don’t want to bother. Bah.
In general, I’m disappointed about the split. I haven’t looked around to see if I would still be allowed to post my stuff on the main board. One of the things I really don’t like about Erato is the exclusivity and narrow-mindedness. I’d hate to see a better board follow that same path.
Some of us argued against the split, but Gaz management wanted to give it a try. And now there’s been a request for a separate “Poetry Lite” board. I think that’s dead, though, thank goodness.
Frankly, I find it interesting how much of a decline there’s been in really serious critiquing across most boards in the last year or so. The Gaz is almost the only serious, fairly heavy-duty board still busy; PFFA’s upper forums, QED, Writer’s Block, and Thin Men of Haddam are barely active any longer. I suspect that serious, experienced writers have, for the most part, exhausted much of the value of such public boards and are relying much more on communication/critique with a close group of like-minded individuals, mostly by e-mail.
Perhaps that’s what a mature poetry board market looks like. I know that Gaz is the only board I’ve posted poems to in a long time, other than my brief, regrettable, return to Erato.
I think pffa’s upper boards suffer because some of us aren’t interesting in giving or receiving that sort of critique. Gaz has always been a place where a brief gut reaction is valued, as is an in-depth line by line (though the latter is rarely valued by me).