I've compiled a list of recommended books
about reading and writing poetry, and a list of useful
reference works and sites.
The Voice of the Shuttle,
an index to humanities resources on the WWW,
is a good starting point if you're looking for a poem by a specific
author, or criticism, or information about a poet -- or anything
else involving the humanities (including art, architecture, history,
linguistics, literary theory, religious studies, and more). Other
sites where you can find poems that have gone out of copyright
include
Project Bartleby,
Project Gutenberg,
the
American Verse Project and the
ThinkQuest Poetry Archive.
Mr. William Shakespeare On The Internet was favorably reviewed
in the Chronicle of Higher Education as an index to texts
by and about the Bard.
There's also a good deal of contemporary poetry available on
the WWW.
Poetry Daily offers a new
poem every day (sometimes by a famous poet such as Billy Collins,
Louise Gluck, or Mark Strand; sometimes by unknowns), with links
to recent newspaper and magazine articles about poetry, and an
archive of the past year's daily poems.
The
Contemporary American Poetry Archive
contains the full text of several dozen books that are out of print
but still under copyright, by poets including Robert Pinsky, David
Slavitt, and Wendy Battin.
You can hear several well-known contemporary poets read from their
own works (and you can also see texts of poems and other writings
by and about them) at
Internet Poetry Archive
and at the
Academy of American Poets web site.
Prof. Eiichi Hishikawa of Kobe University has an
annotated listing of web sites containing poems, biographies,
bibliographies, and other information by or about more than 140
modern and contemporary English-language poets.
Many literary magazines have web sites on which
they display recently-published poems; some magazines, of course,
publish exclusively on the WWW, while others have both print and
electronic editions.
The best reference book about poetry is The New Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, almost 1400 pages of
fine print, written by noted scholars, covering everything from
poetries of different languages (Swahili, Japanese, Russian)
and periods (Romantic, Neoclassical) to technical and critical terms
(anapest, chiasmus, epic) to theory (deconstruction, reader response)
-- but no articles on individual poets. It's not online, but many
libraries' reference departments have it.
Rhyme's Reason by John Hollander and How To Be Well-Versed
In Poetry edited by E.O. Parrott are witty dictionaries of
poetic forms in which the self-referential examples are
the definitions.
Online there are glossaries of
poetic terms
and
rhetorical terms.
I've compiled a list of
recommended books
about reading and writing poetry; a list of
haiku resources;
and a list of web sites and books about
getting published,
with a special note on
poetry contests.
Here is a bibliography and some samples of
my poems and non-fiction books.
I am a graduate of the low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing
program at
Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.
To find out the origin of an English word or phrase, the best
place to start is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
which
not only gives the etymology of each word, but also provides
quotations showing the word's use in context from sources dating
back to the 11th century or earlier. It's available in many
libraries as a 20-volume set, but can also be bought in a fine-print
one-volume edition (with magnifying glass) for about $300, or as
a CD-ROM for computer use. Many libraries' websites offer access to an online version
to holders of library cards. Or, online, try the newsgroup
alt.usage.english or the
alt.usage.english Frequently Asked Questions file,
and the century-old, but still remarkably useful and entertaining,
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
You can send encrypted e-mail to me (bruce.tindall@gmail.com) using either
PGP/GPG or X.509 certificates such as those issued by CAcert.org.
You can download my PGP and CAcert public keys here.
I am also a CAcert assurer and will be happy to meet in person to
grant CAcert assurance points and to exchange PGP key signatures.
My amateur radio ("ham radio") callsign is N4JIU; I was formerly
N5ECD, WB4MZD, and WN4MZD, first licensed in 1969. I also was one
of the operators of club station K1CTQ in the early 1970s. My
membership number in QRP ARCI is 10495, and in FISTS, 7804.
To learn more about amateur radio, see the website of the
American
Radio Relay League.
Urban legends can be debunked or verified on newsgroups such
as alt.folklore.urban, alt.folklore.suburban and alt.folklore.college,
and web sites such as the
genuine alt.folklore.urban archive and
the "snopes" site. You can
check out suspicious Internet chain letters, petitions, virus
warnings and the like at the websites listed in the "Virus Information"
links on the U.S. Department of Energy's
Cyber Incident Response
Capability page.
My old
home page contains photos, recipes, the official
"People With No Lives" logo and link, and stuff like that.
Bruce Tindall Contemporary Poetry
Poetry Reference Books and Sites
Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.
MFA in Writing at Vermont College
Words, Words
E-mail Encryption
Amateur Radio
Urban Legends and Internet Hoaxes
Old Home Page
bruce.tindall@gmail.com
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