WORLD’S FIRST: Mobile poetry archive at poets.org
Poets.org has unveiled the world’s first mobile poetry archive. Click here, for “Woo or woe on the go.”
You can preview the mobile site from your desktop or laptop. Poems are arranged by occasion or theme.
There’s a Poem in Your Pocket section, with poems like “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye, “Broadway” by Mark Doty, and, yes, “Shirt” by Robert Pinsky, “Chaplinesque” by Hart Crane, “Pockets” by Howard Nemerov and many others. Remember, Poem in Your Pocket Day is coming up during National Poetry Month, on April 17.
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What with spring arriving, I’ve been rethinking, rewriting Matsuo Basho’s “First day of spring”:
First day of spring, cold –
I sit alone, remembering
the end of autumn.
Robert Bly has written that “the psychic tone of nature strikes many people as having some melancholy in it. The tone of nature is related to what human beings call ‘grief,’ what Lucretius calls ‘the tears of things,’ what in Japanese poetry is called mono no aware, the slender sadness.”
Odd, isn’t it? that sadness… but it’s exactly the sort of poverty and sensitivity that opens up the mystery and awareness of the now. It can also bring joy, focusing, as Mary Oliver has put it, “the rich lens of attention.”
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Interesting tidbit from The Virginia Quarterly:
Waldo Jaquith wrote, “This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering clichéd topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true.” Check it out here.
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POETS & WRITERS CLASSIFIEDS
Check out the Poets & Writers classifieds for March/April 2008. . . . much useful information, including deadlines for summer residencies, competitions, calls for manuscripts, conferences, events, jobs, miscellaneous, personals, publications, rentals, resources, services and workshops.
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Send poems or write them right here in the reply box. In recent posts, I listed a phone number with voice mail, inviting you to call in poems (don’t forget to leave your phone number for verification), and my address if you want to send hard copy. Here is my contact information again:
Vic Burkhammer
MountainWord
The Charleston Gazette
1001 Virginia St. E.
Charleston, WV 25301
My phone number with voice mail is:
(304) 348-5184.
If your poem is a good one, I may feature it on MountainWord. To send poems, mp3 demos or poetry-related news, click my e-mail link here. Here’s what I’m looking for this time around: poems of under 30 well-written lines. I love short, effective poems. Nothing sentimental or old-fashioned, just lots of precision, strong imagery. The tone can run the gamut from humorous to serious.
