Poetry Radio Project

American Public Media and the Poetry Foundation have teamed up to bring poetry to the radio. Here's a brief overview of the project and the programs featured.
I feel bad saying it, but I just about never listen to the radio, in part because I use public transportation so much more than a car. It never occurs to me to listen online because these days I mostly work in silence.
But poetry on the radio makes sense because it is meant to be read outloud and listened to, not simply read. Poetry is not like a closet drama. Hearing the actual poet read their work often makes more sense then simply reading it on the page (though with all the interesting ways poetry appears on the page these days, seeing it as it's being read is also illuminating.) Hearing a poet read even one of their poems makes it easier to understand their poetry in general, because you can then hear in your mind's ear their voice reading every poem.

Let Me Link You Guys Up

I've been spending a lot of time on the Poetry Foundation's website.  It's a very cool place to be, but I find myself with one quibble: not enough links on the poet biographies.  The poet biographies are great and contain all the important and most interesting facts about particular poets.  The problem is that the biographies frequently reference individual poems, which, despite the Foundation having on their site, are not simply linked.  I hate to say it, but in this day and age, people are lazy.  If it isn't linked right in an article, a lot of people aren't going to go looking for whatever, even though it's often as simple as copying and pasting and then putting it through a search engine. 
As far as I can tell, the Poetry Foundation doesn't have internships, which is really too bad, because I would totally offer to fix this problem for them.  I taught myself basic HTML coding about ten yeas ago.  Making links is one of the easiest things to do, something I practice here on Blogger.  (Though I don't really have to because the website sets it up so that you don't have to use HTML, I like doing things old school.)  The best part about an internship like this is that I wouldn't necessarily have to travel to Chicago, if I had access to their website, I could just do it from any old computer with an Internet connection. 

Poetry and Death go Together like Peanut Butter and Jelly

The Poetry Foundation has this great article up on their website called "Ghost Hunting with the Dead Poets Society of America" by Kathleen Rooney.  Midway through the article, she mentions that all poets, whether living or not, are already dead, since their art is a dead one.  It's true, but I had never thought of it that way.  She goes on to say that "Poetry and death go together like peanut butter and jelly," which has got to be one of the funniest and bizarre lines about poetry I've ever heard.  (But in a good way.)  
I get the feeling that Ms. Rooney has had a hard time with live poets, because when she says "Dead poets typically won’t humiliate you for liking them, won’t betray your affection by overproducing second-rate work, or espousing unsavory political beliefs, or publishing something cheap and clever in the New Yorker" there's a tone there that sounds a little too much like someone trying to not talk about a breakup with the love of their life.  Though, to be fair, I'm the same way.  This past fall, The Red Cedar Review got the lovely Steve Healey as our faculty adviser.  As he is a poet and I was the Poetry Editor, he went to be to see if he could get someone to write us a poem.  (Someone famous, hopefully.)  He asked me who I liked.  I told him truthfully that a lot of the poets I liked best were dead.  Healey, I suspect, appreciated the honesty.