Poetry

Serious poets spend their lives crafting with words. Serious poets practice and study and practice some more. And serious poets also use the world as their implements. It might seem antithetical to use poetry “tools” to write poetry, but poets do it all the time—taking ideas and inspiration from the people, events, and places about them, creating responses in various forms, crafting found and other types of poetry.

In my few years of cruising the cyber-highways, I have encountered some remarkable, useful, and even useless but fun poetry tools and resources. Here are a few of the many that have consumed my time for more than just a few brief moments and on more than one occasion:

POETRY TOOLS

The exquisite corpse is a blast. Originating with the Dadaists who would share a line or two or a sketched fragment, fold the majority of the text or image back, pass it on for the next person to add and do the same, the exquisite corpse often is an uncanny, complete, profound poem (or picture).

Try contributing to the effort by reading the last line given you and then adding the next line in your words. Then click on the results:

http://www.onegecko.com/dada/dadapoem.php

Poetry Forge offers teaching poetry tools, but you can use the offerings, too, such as the crafting a metaphor tool—which inspires you to come up with fresh metaphors for such abstractions as “spring,” “freedom,” and “diversity.” All you need are a flash player and an open and ready creativity:

http://www.poetryforge.org/teaching.htm

Although contemporary poetry goes pretty easy on the rhyming and rhyme schemes, the online rhyming dictionary is, if not handy, fun:

http://www.rhymer.com/

Magnetic poetry is one of the most brilliant inventions of the 20th century: it levels the playing field; but it also allows you to play and then use what you have fooled with as material for your next found poem. Choose from such topic sets as Horse Lover, Shakespeare, Genius, My Friend, Pick-up Lines, Innuendo, Dog Lover, Cat Lover, College, and Artist:

http://www.magneticpoetry.com/magnet/

Though not a tool per se, Googlism is a “search” engine that allows you to type in your name, your enemy’s name, your dog’s name, or any name or noun…and get back what the world wide web has to offer. It is a kick:

http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=poetry&type=1

 

POETRY RESOURCES

I won’t begin to list, name, or describe all of the fantastic poetry resources, but a few need mention here.

My poetry Express is an online community where you can access poetry databases, personalize your experience, communicate with others, and take inspiration from such pages as “Fifteen poems you can write now, which is located at http://www.poetryexpress.org/15poems.htm

Fun With Words will compel you with hundreds of interactive word games, trivia, and other linguistic goodies—from gripes from tech support about customers and gripes from costumers about tech support to a kooky dialectizer and a modern version of Mad Labs called Crazy Libs. And the site is one of the easiest on the web to navigate…considering it has a hefty collection/database:

http://rinkworks.com/words/

And if, indeed, you are one of the serious poets I alluded to at the start of this message to you, you will appreciate these next two websites, one The Craft of Poetry, Vince Gotera’s online course materials, the other the oddly named Fun with Forms (which defines and provides examples for the forms of poetry we write or have written0, provided by Judy Lightfoot:

http://www.uni.edu/%7Egotera/CraftOfPoetry/index.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~judylightfoot/funforms.html

And New Poets Press, where “inspiration meets the page,” has links, information, lessons, and other valuable offerings, while Poetry Resources provides lists of lists of lists of links to resources galore:

http://www.newpoetspress.com/index.html

http://www.wisdomportal.com/CPITS/PoetryResources-1.html

Of course, any wordsmith will love wordplay, so here is a link to a panoply of word games:
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/games/index.html

Be serious, be reckless, but be poetic…and enjoy every glorious word.