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Lasting or Instantaneous: Poetry on the Net

© Roxianne Moore

I've found some great poetry sites on the Web. You can read the best new poems, wander through reams of classics, or submit your own work (even in audio!).

Atlantic Monthly Poetry Page is a good place to start. The current page features:

An Audible Anthology with poems from the October issue, including Nina Cassian, William Matthews, and Robert Morgan, W. S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Linda Pastan, Stephen Sandy, Peter Davison and many others. To listen to the on-line readings, you'll need RealAudio — a link is provided to download the program, which is fairly small. (A word of warning: If there's too much traffic on the server, you may not be able to listen to the recording in real time. In that case, you may be better off downloading the reading to listen to at another time.)

Atlantic Monthly Poetry Online, a collection of poetry published in the online edition since 1993.

Swimming Up into Poetry (August 1997). "Peter Davison reflects on the career of W. S. Merwin, whose long association with The Atlantic spans vast distances of geography and art. Plus, Merwin reads a selection of his recent poems from The Atlantic's pages."

Emily Dickinson (Un)discovered. In 1891 Thomas Wentworth Higginson considered his correspondence with the Dickinson and reproduces many of her letters and early poems.

Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, (1902). John Townsend Trowbridge, who recounts his friendship with Whitman.

Volume One, Number One — November, 1857. The first issue, featuring poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier.

The Live Poets Society provides an outlet for your creativity and an audience for your latest work. New poems are uploaded every couple of days, so the page is always fresh. Some of the best features are:

The Latest Poetry — Poems going back more than a year.

Poetry in Real Audio — Listen (using Real Audio, see above) to a virtual poetry reading.

The Bookstore — writers' tools, poetry, the Internet, special interest, and miscellaneous

Other Poetry Links — Links to web pages by and for poets, mostly poets' personal web sites.

And now for something completely different: The Virtual Fridge. You know those magnetic poetry kits? Well, with this on-line version, you can create your own poems to present on the world's refrigerator. A lot of the work here is great; most of it is lighthearted; and some of it is in questionable taste. Try your hand at it, and post your work!

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