Serendipity35

I have been hosting a website and accompanying blog for the past ten years called Poets Online. It's a site that invites poets to try a monthly writing prompt and then submit a poem for possible online publication. I always choose poems as models for the writing prompt that are already available online because the site's archive of prompt and poems gets much more traffic than the current prompt or poems.  Just as this blog will get less than a hundred hits today specifically on this post, after a few weeks, the post will have a few hundred and a few thousand in two months. That's the long tail of doing a site or blog.

Now, there's a new source of potential models I can use -and all teachers of poetry can use - of poets online reading their work on video. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation announced at their poetry festival last weekend that they are officially opening their channel on YouTube. They have thousands of hours of high quality video from the twelve festivals of most of the big names in contemporary American poetry and many international poets.

I can imagine the hurdles in doing this - clearances on poems and performances, digitizing the video - but it has launched. There are only a dozen or so available now (probably rushed to completion to coincide with the festival) but their archive will be large.

They have added a donate button to the channel in the hopes that users (including schools) will be willing to support their efforts and defray the cost of such a project.

Using YouTube allows us to link to specific videos from our own sites or from a course management system or embed their videos in our blogs and web pages. It would possible to create a web page anthology of poetry that could be used in a course and would be more appealing to students than any paper edition. Of course, you could add the surrounding text of biography, notes etc. yourself.

Their first choices are interesting ones. First off, I viewed were Mark Doty reading "The House of Beauty" which starts with a fire at a beauty parlor in Jersey City, and takes off into an essay on beauty itself. Though I attended that festival, I didn't catch that performance, so finding the video was great.

Billy Collins, a very popular poets known for his humor, reads two serious poems - "On the Death of a Next Door Neighbor" and "What Love Does"  which I will embed here.

This is all so new (most of these were posted only a few days before the festival), that when I created this post the Dodge Foundation channel on YouTube was actually not available, but hopefully is back online by the time you read this.