To my students:
I wanted to post a few online poetry resources. These are places I visit from time-to-time and that I think might be useful/interesting/entertaining to you. It’s from my own interests, so feel free to drop me a note via the comment box or e-mail if you think I’m missing a good resource.
There are two blogs that are very useful because they gather lots of poetry-related articles from around the web, including performances and interviews. Silliman’s Blog is run by the language poet Ron Silliman and comes from that perspective, a little mocking/suspicious of the “mainstream.” The other blog, which more or less represents the new mainstream, is Harriet, which is offered by The Poetry Foundation. (I say the “new mainstream” because what’s mainstream now is a little different than what poets like Silliman talk about because Silliman and others have pulled the mainstream a little more in their direction than it used to flow.)
There are several websites that are more academic. I don’t usually read these, but I use them as a reference in my teaching, so you might use them as well:
Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry website collects a lot of information about American poetry: bios, representative poems, reviews, criticism, etc. I highly recommend browsing around on this site.
The Western Wind website is, well, a website that is supposed to work with our textbook. But poking around on it has revealed little of use. It mostly duplicates stuff in our textbook, provides some small amount of extra material. I suspect it’s mostly a marketing tool, but I’d love for you one of you to prove me wrong!
The Poetry Foundation website. These are the Harriet people from above. The website is pretty good too, especially the “Find a poem” tool. That “find a poem” thing be helpful on Mother’s Day, etc..
The Academy of American Poets website has a great deal of information. Currently, it offers bios, reviews, poems, lectures on and by poets, and some discussion boards. I’d recommend trying the two audio essays currently available on the front page (one by Cate Marvin, the other by Nathaniel Mackey). It also offers, like The Poetry Foundation site, thematic collections of poems. So you can currently click a link for poems about the body, aging, love, turmoil, dreams, winter, and Black History Month. Sadly, there are no poems about aging bodies experiencing the turmoil of love-dreams in late winter during Black History Month.
There are some media collections that I can recommend enthusiastically. One is the amazing and awesome Ubuweb. This is a very large collection of mostly avant-garde work in video and audio recordings. There’s music, interviews, readings, performance pieces, lectures, all sorts of stuff. I recommend checking out the “top ten” list on the right side of the page to get a feel for what’s on offer, as well as just browsing around. There’s some interesting, strange and wonderful, crazy-brilliant stuff here.
PoemTalk is a podcast series sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, the Kelly Writers House. & PennSound. I highly recommend this. The podcasts are simply poets and poetry scholars sitting around a table talking about one particular poem. They’re short, always less than a half-hour, and they include the poet reading his/her own poem. I almost always enjoy these discussions. The most recent one I heard, “After the Night Years: On ‘The Sun Came’ by Etheridge Knight,” would be a great introduction to the podcast series.
One of the sponsors of the PoemTalk series, PennSound, also has a website with some video and audio recordings of poetry readings and discussions. These vary in length and, sometimes, in recording quality, but they’re often interesting as well. Since they tend to be longer, with barely-audible audience questions, I think the podcast is a better first choice.
As time provides, I’ll be providing some links to some resources specific to our library, but that’s for a later post.
Update (11 Mar 2011): The Kootenay School of Writing audio archives are a wonderful resource.
