This evening I stumbled onto a relatively new poetry site that is predicated on a novel idea. Ok, I guess it’s really a poetic idea. Poet Frank Giampietro has created a web site with recordings of poems that are recited by heart. While Giampietro would like to have more celebrity poets recorded on the site, he encourages any writers to submit mp3 file of a favorite poem and a little bit about what it is about the poem that is special to them.
Memorizing poems has become almost a lost art and Giampietro’s site is a wonderful way to promote memorization and at the same time expose this poems to a wider audience. Check out the site for yourself. I recall Claudia Emerson and Robert Pinsky as being among those already on the site. Enough babble about it – go check out POEMS BY HEART for yourself!
"The trained hand does not forget its skill, nor can we lay the precision and speed aside: strength we have, and courage in the acetylene will."
The diminutive, dark-haired Marin jeweler Kate Ellen recites the line from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, from memory.
"Metal itself is inspiring, adds the twenty seven-year-old jewelry designer, "It is a really weird property--it is really strong and it's also malleable. If worst comes to worst, and I blow something, I can melt it down and then it becomes a raw material again."
The dichotomy of fine poetry and hard-edged metal, is the inspiration for this artisan's totally hand-crafted and completely unique jewelry designs. FULL STORY
Best Poetry Blogs: A Baker's Dozen
Poetry Blogs Help Poets Expand the Horizons of Their Art
Can't afford $30,000-plus for a poetry MFA program? Engaging with poetry blogs can advance your education in the art of poetry-free of charge.
The Web offers terrific resources for poets, and among the most useful are poetry blogs. They address a need all that poets have for a circle of like-minded people devoted to sharing their knowledge and passion about poetry. This is especially important for poets whose local communities don’t offer poetry groups and for poets who can’t afford the hefty cost of an MFA program. Poetry blogs help readers keep up on new publications, issues of craft, poetic trends, and strategies for dealing with more pragmatic aspects of the writing life.
