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Useful Resources : Websites for Poets and Writers : Essays on Poetry
AlienFlower: Quick Guidelines for a Poetry Critique
How to make suggestions while sparing feelings, keep workshops on track. We also enjoyed Richard Brodie's Haiku Anagrams.
| | American Life in Poetry
Weekly column by former US poet laureate Ted Kooser presents contemporary American poems and a short discussion of the techniques that make them effective. This series is designed to be reprinted for free by newspapers and online periodicals (with attribution), in order to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. You may also sign up for free weekly emails. Sponsored by The Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress.
| | An ABC of Translating Poetry, an essay by Willis Barnstone
Master poet Willis Barnstone explores the act of translation, "a friendship between poets...a mystical union between them based on love and art. As in ordinary religious mysticism, the problem of ineffability exists: how do you find words to say the unsayable?" Barnstone singles out for praise the translations of Mary Herbert, Hölderlin, Pasternak, Rilke, Valéry, Lowell, Moore, Pound, Quasimodo, and Bishop.
| | An Honest Answer by Ginger Andrews, reviewed by Dr. Joseph S. Salemi
Poet and classical scholar Joseph Salemi (see bio and poems) probes the limitations of contemporary free-verse confessional poetry.
| | Anatomy of a Poetry Contest
See how a judge weighs poems in this essay by Virgil Suarez. Mr. Suarez, an accomplished poet in his own right, has judged over a dozen contests. "It keeps me in touch with the poetry that is being written at the moment.... Nothing better to keep the blood pumping."
| | Bad Poets, a short essay by Randall Jarrell
Mr. Jarrell (1914-1965) was a leading American poet and critic. These are his blunt yet compassionate reflections on judging badly written poetry.
| | Boston Comment
Hard-hitting essays on the state of contemporary poetry, by poet and critic Joan Houlihan. Among her targets: incoherent experimental poetry, free verse that sounds like prose, and famous names who are past their prime. Houlihan's Algonkian Poetry Workshops are worthwhile online classes for more advanced poets who have outgrown the feedback available from most online forums and writing schools. She is also founding director of the Concord Poetry Center which offers conferences and workshops in Massachusetts.
| | Can Poetry Matter? an essay by Dana Gioia
Poetry is imprisoned in the cozy cells of academia and specialty publishers. Most people are oblivious to it. "The traditional machinery of transmission - the reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies - has broken down." It's time to unleash great poems again on the public. Here's how. Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly.
| | Christian Science Monitor: Of Poems & Poetry
Interviews and profiles of major contemporary poets, plus book reviews and poetry news.
| | Comstock Review: The Poet's Handbook
Detailed guidance for poets from the Comstock Writers' Group. Make your poetry submissions look professional. See poetry as an editor sees it. All poets should read this before actively submitting to contests and journals.
| | Death to the Death of Poetry, an essay by Donald Hall
Poetry has been dying all its life. Newsweek just added its nail to the coffin ("Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Care?" 5/5/03). The doomsayers are dead wrong, writes Don Hall, but "no one wants to believe me."
| | Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, an essay by Dana Gioia
The average American spends just 24 minutes a day reading printed matter, compared to hours of TV and radio. Writing is beginning to seem old-fashioned. Yet verse is enjoying a surge of popularity. "Without doubt the most surprising and significant development in recent American poetry has been the wide-scale and unexpected reemergence of popular poetry - namely rap, cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and certain overtly accessible types of what was once a defiantly avant-garde genre, performance poetry."
| | Dispoet
Insightful blog about poetry and disability includes brief reviews and discussions of contemporary poets writing about the subject (Floyd Skloot, Jim Ferris and others), plus contests and resources.
| | Does Poetry Matter? an essay by William Waltz
Prizewinning poet William Waltz investigates why there are more writers than readers of poetry. Today's highbrow poets, he ventures, should plumb their playful side. "Despite the messy state of affairs today, the poetry world is primed for (and maybe on the verge of) a roaring comeback. And, although many poets seem content to write poems that only connoisseurs and mothers could love, a growing populist movement seems bent on dragging poetry back into the mainstream."
| | Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer
Poet and memoirist Mary Karr muses on the resemblance between poetry and prayer as "sacred speech" that eases the soul's isolation. Karr also describes her recent conversion to Catholicism from a secular upbringing that made a religion out of art and literature. "People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror."
| | Here Comes Everybody: Writers on Writing
Quirky interviews with contemporary poets are featured on this weblog. Read Ron Silliman on baseball statistics, Annie Finch explaining poetry to a seven-year-old, and more.
| | Kate Greenstreet's Poetry Interviews Blog
Poet Kate Greenstreet blogs at Every Other Day, where she's compiled an archive of over 100 interviews with contemporary poets about the road to first-book publication and how it changed their life (or not). Highlights include advice from Steve Fellner, author of 'Blind Date with Cavafy', on how the right title can help your manuscript get past the contest screeners.
| | Philip Nikolayev: Interview
Insights on formal innovation, "self-subversion" and the growth of the artist, from the editor of the innovative annual journal Fulcrum. Nikolayev's book Monkey Time won the 2001 Verse Prize.
| | Poetry and Politics, October 2003: A Conversation with William Pitt Root
Pulitzer-nominated poet William Pitt Root riffs on poetry, politics and moral courage in this interview with Daniela Gioseffi. Mr. Root is the author of "The Unbroken Diamond: Nightletter to the Mujahideen".
| | Poetry Debates & Manifestos
Thirty-one younger American poets take on some of the great debates and literary manifestos from the history of modern poetry. One of many stimulating compilations from the Academy of American Poets' National Poetry Almanac.
| | Poetry Magic
A large collection of articles on writing poetry, understanding poetry and getting published. Novice and advanced topics covered. Examples include modernist poetry, postmodernist poetry, sounds in poetry, performing your poem and chaos approaches to poetry analysis.
| | Poetry's Perilous Popularity
From Slate, A.O. Scott and Katha Pollitt probe the gap between 'official' poetry and poetry's stealth bestsellers, and the challenge of teaching classic work without scaring students away. "I think a lot more Americans read poetry than we think, just not necessarily the poets most admired by Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom."
| | Rhyme or Reason - What Makes a Good Poem?
J. Paul Dyson, editor of FirstWriter magazine, discusses how to integrate rhyme more effectively into your poem and choose the right style for your subject. Too often, says Dyson, beginning poets focus solely on making the lines rhyme, at the expense of word choice and flow.
| | Silliman's Blog
Thoughtful reflections on contemporary poetry and poetics from award-winning poet and editor Ron Silliman.
| | Ten Tips for Psychological Survival in Writing
Bruce Holland Rogers, author of Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer, has kindly allowed us to reprint his top 10 survival tips. Rogers' gentle advice will ease your heart and unblock your passages.
| | The Alsop Review Poetry Lessons
Practical advice for emerging poets on such topics as line breaks, metaphor, meter and rhyme.
| | The e-Writer's Place: Poetry Channel
Meaty articles on the theory and craft of writing. Includes advice to the young Charlotte Bronte.
| | The Fortunes of Formalism
Poet and critic David Yezzi makes the case for mastery of verse forms and prosody as essential to the education of a poet, and gives a historical perspective on formalism's loss of status.
| | The Poetess in America, an essay by Annie Finch
A well-researched defense of poets who fell out of fashion with the rise of literary modernism. Finch, an acclaimed formalist poet, is critical of modern poetry's emphasis on originality and linguistic complexity. Room should be made for poetry that expresses a community's values in accessible and heartfelt language. Poetesses like Teasdale and Millay "offer a valuable strategy of renewal for poets in the twenty-first century, particularly for women poets who need a new way to connect with pre-twentieth century poetic traditions."
| | Vulgata Magazine
Online journal of poetry and prose published by St. Jerome Ministries, "a Catholic organization which seeks to promote the Faith through reasoned persuasion in apologetics, magisterial loyalty in content, and artful prose in presentation." Notable features include the as-yet-incomplete "Areopagus University", a series of essays on using archetypes to craft compelling fiction. Classical art and tongue-in-cheek archaic language contribute to the website's mood of pageantry and mystery.
| | What Makes Good Poetry, an essay by John R. Haws
Self-taught poet and essayist John R. Haws offers down-to-earth reflections on how to make your work come alive. "Poetry, good poetry that is, bites and stings. It arouses your senses. It burns a hole in your brain. It stimulates your imagination. You think, 'I never thought it like that before.' Yet, It (whatever it is) was always there for everyone to see."
| | Why Teachers Can't Read Poetry, an essay by John Kilgore
Despite countless classroom hours lavished on poetry, most students don't read it, quote it or understand it once they graduate. High school teachers have a lot to answer for. It's not that students hate poetry per se, what they really hate "is what we do to poetry: how we falsify and condescend to it, how we shrink from its rigor, duck its moral challenges, hide from its intelligence. They despise the way we substitute tame toothless pseudo-poems for the real thing, or turn real poems into pseudo-poems with our half-baked readings. If I am right, it follows that the time is ripe to launch a comprehensive counter-pedagogy, one that is authoritarian, teacher-centered, intimidating, madly analytical, abrasive, sneering, elitist and belletristic: all the qualities I have been trying to model here. I see no reason to wait for the research. Whatever we try, we can do no worse."
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