For the past year, I've had a feature on the website allowing you to receive Poems by Email. When you subscribe, you automatically receive a different poem from one of my books in your email each week. But I've gotten requests from people who would like to receive the new poems as I post them on the website.

You asked for it, and here it is. You can now subscribe to receive poems from my books each week, or new poems as I post them on the website, or both if you like.

To subscribe to the new poems list, visit the Poems by Email page on this website and enter your email address for "List #2 - Newest Poetry4kids.com Poems by Email." Sometimes you'll get new poems every day and sometimes it may be weeks between each poem. As I write them, they will appear in your email.

Regardless of which mailing list you subscribe to, you can unsubscribe at any time, and your email address will never be shared with anyone else.

Enjoy!

Whoops. I just discovered that I goofed when putting up this month's poetry writing contest on poetry4kids.com. I mistakenly entered the expiration date for the contest as 2004 instead of 2009, so the contest never appeared on the website. I've fixed this now, so if you've written an April Fool's Day poem for this month's contest, you can enter it now.

Please note: This it not to be confused with the Time for Kids Poetry Writing Contest, which is a separate contest that is running for this month only.

Some of you may have noticed that it's been a while since I updated the Poetry4kids.com funny poetry podcast. The reason is that, because of the way I set it up last year, it was too much work to maintain and update. Adding a new episode to the podcast would take at least an hour or two; time that I really didn't have.

So, rather than let it continue to languish, I decided to try again, and to come up with something that would not take so much of my time to keep up to date. I signed up with a new podcast host, and settled on a simpler format for the episodes themselves; one which requires less editing time.

If you haven't listened to the Poetry4kids.com podcast, or if you listened, but gave up when there weren't any new episodes, I'd like to invite you to try out the new and improved Poetry4kids.com podcast.

I just added a couple of new word games to the website, Word Drop and Word Ruffle, and I'm really excited about both of them.

Word Drop is sort of like a cross between Tetris and Bookworm, except with falling letters instead of blocks. The object of the game is to click on letters to form words; the longer the words, the more points you get.

Word Ruffle gives you a handful of letters, and your job is to form as many words as you can out of those letters.

I will continue to add new word games and poetry games to the website as I find them. Happy playing!

There isn't a week that goes by that I don't receive email from someone asking me to send them poems by email. As much as I would like to, I honestly can't keep track of everyone, and I wouldn't have time to send out all those emails every week. But I finally found a good solution!

I have now set up an automated system to send poems by email every week. To try it out, simply enter your email address in the "Poems By Email" block on the right side of the home page of poetry4kids.com. You will immediately receive an email with a verification link in it to ensure that you entered a valid email address. Click on this link and you will start receiving poems in your email; your first poem will come right away, and you will receive a different poem every week.

This new service is completely free, you can unsubscribe at any time, and your email address will remain totally private. I won't give or sell your email address to anyone, I won't send you spam, and I won't send you more than one poem each week.

So, go ahead! Give it a try. And feel free let me know what you think.

In addition to creating the new podcast, I have also begun sending out a monthly email newsletter. The newsletter lets readers know what I've been up to for the past month and provides information about my books, school visits, and more. Until now, I've only sent it to members of the website who wanted to receive it. If you are not a member of poetry4kids.com, but you would still like to receive the monthly newsletter, just visit the Newsletter page to sign up. If you change your mind, you can unsubscribe at any time.

There has been a problem with the email system on poetry4kids.com for about a month now, and I have been so busy with other things that I have not had a chance to get it fixed.

This means that if you tried to contact me using one of the email forms or email a poem from the website, your email did not go through. It also means that if you tried to sign up for a new account, you would not have received the activation email, which is why there have been no new members for the last month or so.

I finally found some time to spend a few hours on the problem, and managed to get the problem fixed.

If you have tried to email me through the website in the last month and did not receive a response, it is because I never received your email. Please accept my apologies for the trouble, and do take the time to contact me again. I should receive your email this time.

Start the new school year with a rhyme by writing a "back to school" poem and entering it in the new poetry contest on Poetry4kids.com. This month's poetry contest is open to all members of Poetry4kids.com (membership is free). Four winners will each receive a free autographed book of funny poetry by Kenn Nesbitt.

To enter, just click on the Contests link in the main menu. Best of luck with your poem!