Poets and Poetry on the Web 

"For very young children, responding to poetry is as natural as breathing."

Jack Prelutsky, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children

Poetry:

Public Broadcasting System's (PBS) "Arthur" pages contain Fern's Poetry Club and is aimed at younger students. Fern is one the many friends of Marc Brown's Arthur Read . She explains six different types of poetry, narrative, limerick, haiku, free verse, cinquan and lyric and provides an example to illustrate each. You may write a poem and submit it to the website or read a selection of submitted poems. It is a simple site meant to be an introduction to poetry.

Poetry Express is a deceptively simple writing workshop. This pretty, uncluttered site has fifteen writing exercises designed to teach and guide your poetry writing. It is interactive as well, featuring an "e-muse" page to use for inspiration. The site is written by a Boise State University professor, Chuck Guilford and has won several web site awards, including Blue Web'n and Webfeet.

Need a rhyme? The Rhyme Zone is an online rhyming dictionary. Just type in the word you need a to rhyme and press the enter key. The screen which appears displays an array of possibilities. The site also features a searchable as well as browseable databases; there's a Shakespearean one, a quotation one and a Mother Goose database as well as some multiple choice quizzes on such subjects as parts of speech and state capital. The site is sometimes slow loading and is mostly text-based, but could be useful.

Can you name the current Poet Laureate? The Library of Congress maintains a Poetry and Literature Center The site has a page about the current and past poets laureate as well as a schedule of readings (if you happen to be in Washington D.C.) and poetry cybercasts.

Poetry 180, was created by the previous Poet Laureate, Billy Collins and is really aimed at high school students. The 180? It's a poem for all 180 days of the school year. His goal is to provide students with a poem to read or have read every day in an effort to make poetry a part of every day life.

The Favorite Poem Project was the brainchild of former Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky. The project is "dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry's role in Americans' lives." It contains a database of over 1000 favorite poems submitted by Americans and invites you to submit your favorite. There is a link to videos of selected poems being read, and a link for teachers' lesson plans. The database is not searchable however and the initial page contains a small number of poems.

Students often enjoy creating haiku. Tiny Words is a website devoted to haiku and was created by poet, Andrew Grossman. You may subscribe to the receive a haiku a day or search the archive. There is also a response page in which readers respond to the "haiku of the day" with their own haiku! The "about" page will answer any questions you might have about the form of haiku, invites you to submit your own and provides links to other haiku pages on the World Wide Web.

Students doing Mrs. Mak's poet project may find the following web sites helpful:

	The Gale Group hosts some free information and The Poet's Corner is one of their free pages as well as biographies of selected poets. Check this page to see if your poet is featured.
	The Librarian's Index to the Internet, is a wonderful resource. It is one of those "hidden web" directories that I encourage you to use. From the main directory, click on Literature, and then click on Poets and Poetry for a list of ninety-five annotated web sites.
	Poets.org is a searchable site where you can search for a poem or a poet, listen to select poetry organized by poet and poem, take part in a discussion or shop. This site is hosted by the American Academy of Poets. There are over 500 biographies of poets.
	The home page of The Poet's Corner boasts 6,700 works by 780 authors. It's mission is to compile the largest and most diverse collection of poetry in the world. It is searchable and indexed by author and poem and contains the biographies of 31 and images of 124 poets.
	The Online Poetry Classroom is another source of biographical information. The biographies are relatively short, but there are links to the poems as well as other sources on the world wide web.
	The University of Toronto hosts a Glossary of Poetic Terms to help you tell your rhyme schemes apart. It is a large text heavy site and geared toward college students, but contains many indexes including, author's name and poem first lines. The glossary is very large and there is also a hyperlinked timeline to explore.
	The Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created Modern American Poetry, affectionately known as MAPS. The project is an ongoing collaborative process among scholars and essayists. The site indexes 161 poets organized alphabetically by last name and contains biographical information as well as samples of poetry.
	American Poems is a commercial site, so you will have to put up with not only banner ads, but the occasional pop-up ad as well. The table of contents contains links to bibliographic and biographic information on thirty poets and over four thousand poems.

Poets on the Web:

e.e. cummings: Modern American Poetry.com has a section devoted to e.e.cummings biography and works.

A biography of American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson can be found in a website maintained by rwe.org. The "About rwe" page does not describe the organization or the qualifications of the writer(s) of the website and it is not the easiest site to navigate, but there are some redeeming features. The biography is accessible and there is a page containing a sample of his penmanship. The chronology page may prove useful to students doing research. His poems are indexed alphabetically by title and "The Concord Tree" is featured in print as well as an audio version narrated by former President Bill Clinton.

Langston Hughes: The Library of Congress maintains a page on Langston Hughes in which Library of Congress Reference Specialist in Poetry, David Kresch discusses Hughes' poetry and importance in American poetry in a twenty minute webcast (which can be used in a research paper. See Mrs. Mak or Mrs. Kahn for guide with citation). The page contains links to other websites within the Library of Congress and on the Internet, including the Modern American Poetry site's biography and sample work, poets.org's page, and like all good librarians provide, a list of print resources which should be useful and consulted.

Poet Bruce Lansky maintains Gigglepoetry, a site recommended by Mrs. Jackson's class. This is a site aimed at elementary students. One appealing feature on the site is a "Rate It" feature. Readers may give the featured poems a letter grade. While many of these poet generated sites are barely disguised advertisement for the poet's work, this site features the work of other poets besides Bruce Lansky. However his books are heavily advertised throughout the site. There is no About page, just a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. I would have appreciated more explanation, but enjoyed the site nonetheless.

Edward Lear: The Edward Lear Homepage, written by a graduate student who wrote a thesis about the English poet contains an "About" page with links to an extensive chronology of Lear's life as well as a bibliography.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear..." You may know the first lines and not know the poem. Read it sometime in its entirety. It was written by Longfellow on the eve of the American Civil War. The Atlantic Online has poetry pages and one article is devoted to Longfellow.

American Poems maintains a biography of him as well as links to pages containing his poems.

Poetry for Kids is an interesting site featuring funny poems and lots of links to other poets' sites. It is written by poet, Ken Nesbitt. Each of his poems contain a rating feature that the reader may submit. One of my favorites was Rapunzel. His pages about "How to Write a Funny Poem" show promise, but are unfinished.

Edgar Allen Poe: Maryland Public Television has put together an appropriately creepy site about Edgar Allen Poe. It is dark and graphics laden, but worth the wait for the graphics to load. There are video clips to watch, audio clips to hear, and a number of interactive opportunities including an interactive visit to the library to research the controversy behind his death. Plan on spending several hours on this award winning site.

Jack Prelutsky:Jack Prelutsky is quite a favorite around Haworth Public School. Visit the site that Scholastic Books maintains for him.

Shel Silverstein: Shel Silverstein's books rarely spend time collecting dust on the shelves of Haworth School Library. A visit to Silverstein's website is a real treat. It is animated so you need to choose the bandwidth that you are using to access the Internet before the site launches. There is plenty of animation, music and sound effects, activities for kids as well as teachers and a short biography. It appears as though the site is maintained by Silverstein's publisher as he died in 1999.

Silverstein's biography in American Poems is short as well. Apparently, he was a very private man.

Walt Whitman: The biography and poetry of Walt Whitman can be found on quite a few web sites. You might start at the Walt Whitman's pages in the American Memories Collection of the Library of Congress. American Poems.com contains a page with a biography and links to the texts of many of his poems.

The Walt Whitman Archive, edited by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, is an extensive, scholarly collection of Whitman's work. It has an mp3 audio of what is thought to be Whitman reading his poem "America," a java-scripted photo archive, and it has a biography page which is so long that there is a drop down Table of Contents on it. There are pages for teachers as well as pages of his manuscripts which, while not digitally reproduced, are a good example of how writers write and edit and re-write. Another page of interest is the "Conditions of Use" page where, in addition to spelling out when and where we may use the authors' work, they tell us how to cite it!