About.com

Dial-a-Poem Still Ringing in Your Ears?

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:10:35 +0000

When this Web site was new, back in 1997, we published an article on poem phone phenomena around the U.S., cataloguing the local phone lines devoted to putting poems in ...

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Launching Poems into the Future

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:06:19 +0000

Here at About.com Poetry, we’re immersed in classic poems that compress history and link us to the experiences and understandings of the poets of many past times. Still, every so often lately I look up from my computer screen and find myself thinking, “We’ve lived into the future”—where speculation leaks into real life, and science fiction becomes everyday reality. And there are poems here, too, in the borderlands between science and science fiction.

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Triolets � Short but not simple

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:15:57 +0000

Some of the shortest poetic forms are most difficult: the triolet, for instance. Like the pantoum, a triolet takes part of its structure from the repetition of entire lines—in fact, three of its lines are repeated, so that the poet only actually has to compose five lines to write a triolet. This extreme repetition, and the fact that only two rhymes can be used in the eight-line poem, restricts the language so tightly that both poet and reader must focus on the very subtle ways in which the sound and meaning of the same words evolves line by line during the progress of the poem.

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Cultivated Words: Garden Poems

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:15:40 +0000

We can think of no better way to mark May’s arrival than to debut our collection of classic poems inspired by gardening and the garden environment. The idea of a garden—a cultivated enclosure, a sanctuary both for the fauna and flora nurtured within its bounds and for the men and women who tend them—has been an important metaphor for poets going back to the very beginning. But it takes many forms and permutations....

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The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:32:02 +0000

William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were separated in childhood after their parents died, but developed a very close relationship as adults and spent the rest of their lives together, even after William was married to Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy and William walked the Lake District hills together, her detailed observations of the natural world served as inspiration for his poems (he wrote “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears...”), and she contributed her ideas to the poetic discussions between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Dorothy kept journals—intended not for publication, but solely for William’s eyes—and their publication a century later opened a window on the writing life of a Romantic poet. After reading those journals, British biographer Frances Wilson wrote The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life (published by Faber in the UK, 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, 2009 ), a fascinating story of the intertwined lives of a poet and his sister and helpmate.

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Open Mic, Spoken Word - Performance Poetry Definitions and How-Tos

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:00:24 +0000

Poems are coming to life in performance all over the US this National Poetry Month, and if you’re looking for the definitions of the New Performance Poetry, this is the place ask your Poetry Guide Bob Holman. See his manifesto “Open Mic: Definitions, Rules, Etiquette, Irony.” The poetry open mic is “a meta-metaphor for freedom, a place where your art can be presented to the public at large,” a place where “all humans are created equal—so long as you don’t go over the time limit!” Our archive of articles on poetry slam, spoken word, and the late 20th century performance poetry renaissance...

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All Kinds of Round Poems: Rondel... Roundel... Rondeau...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:25:06 +0000

Many of the formal kinds of poetry we know in English today can be traced to origins in the poems and songs of French troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, and many of those fixed forms are cousins, from the rondeau with its repeating refrain and strict rhyme scheme, to the brief and even more tightly rhymed triolet, to the complex scheme of alternating refrain lines that marks the villanelle. We’ve just added two more kinds of “round” poems to our glossary of poetic forms—the rondel, presumably a relative of the rondeau, also deriving its name from the French word for “round” (in this case “little round”), and the roundel, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s variant form invented in the 19th century. Our library has selected examples of all these forms, for poets and readers alike to share the fun in serious word play.

Carry a Poem in Your Pocket Today!

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:01:21 +0000

One of the best ideas that has taken root in April as part of National Poetry Month is Poem in Your Pocket Day—this year today’s the day, Thursday, April 18. It began more than a decade ago in New York City, and the Academy of American Poets has made Poem in Your Pocket Day a truly national celebration. “The idea is simple: select a poem you love... then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends.”

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Signs of Neruda at Isla Negra and the Pentland Firth

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:12:18 +0000

Maybe, just maybe, the lingering mystery and suspicions surrounding the death of Pablo Neruda 40 years ago are about to be put to rest. This week the Chilean government exhumed his body for tests to determine whether the cause of the poet’s demise was poison, as suspected by some of the people who saw him in his last days. We’ve seen Neruda’s passing ascribed to causes as various as prostate cancer, leukemia, and heart failure, but because he died less than two weeks after the coup that brought down his friend Salvador Allende and ended his hopes for a Marxist government in Chile, because he was planning to go into exile in Mexico, because the power of his political voice would have made him a likely target of the new military regime, because his home was searched and ransacked by the army, and because of the rumors of a strange injection given by an unknown doctor at the clinic where he died, the questions persist.

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The Universe in 14 Lines

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:45:54 +0000

Sonnets come in many flavors—originating in medieval Italian, the sonnet has captured the imagination of poets all over the world, who have adapted the form to many different languages. The first sonnets were lyrics addressed to the poet’s beloved—like Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?...

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