April is National Poetry Month, for better or verse...

The mention of April usually brings to mind fools and tax deadlines. But April is also "National Poetry Month" and the Internet is a treasure trove of poetry and poetry-related resources for budding bards, professional poets and the occasionally ode-obsessed alike.

The Academy of American Poets Web site's National Poetry Month (NPM) page http://www.poets.org/npm/npmfrmst.htm lists a variety of NPM resources, including tipsheets, graphics and useful poetry contacts, online and off. Also assembled are links to poetry-related journals and magazines, databases and indices, poetry exhibits and major funding and arts advocacy organizations. An interesting feature of this site is the Listening Booth, where users actually can listen to authors read their poems aloud.

"Robert Pinsky, the 39th poet laureate of the United States, believes that poetry is a vocal art, an art meant to be read aloud." This statement opens the "Welcome" page of the Favorite Poem Project http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/index9.html. Sponsored by the Library of Congress in partnership with Boston University and the New England Foundation for the Arts, this initiative will "create a turn-of-the-millennium (poetry) archive that captures American voices, faces and choices, and represents people from every state and with varying regional accents, ages, professions, kinds of education and backgrounds." The site includes samplings of the archive's poems, as well as information on the project, its sponsors and how to host a reading.

UB's Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ is a gateway to the growing field of poetic works in digital media. Among other things, this site has a gallery of visual poetry, an audio archive and a section devoted entirely to "E-Poetry." See http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/ for listings of kinetic, hypertext and computer-generated poetry (for more details about EPC, see story on page 4). Because such work requires software that visually alters traditional text, EPC also links to tools like Burning Press' TextWorx Toolshed http://www.burningpress.org/toolbox/index.html. This site allows users to download programs and resources for the "disassembly, reorganization and reassembly of language-hopefully useful for writers and experimentalists who want to jump-start their creativity, or otherwise wreck havoc upon an unsuspecting text."

To round off your couplet craving, plan to attend one of the installments of the "Wednesdays at 4 PLUS" poetics series. The Spring 2000 schedule can be viewed at http://epc.buffalo.edu/poetics/calendar/spring00.html. And don't forget a visit to the UB Libraries' Poetry and Rare Books Collection http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/pl/, which has extensive holdings-more than 90,000 volumes-in 20th-century poetry in English and English translation, as well as poets' notebooks, letters and manuscripts, and a wide variety of literary magazines. The Poetry and Rare Books Collection, open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, is located in 420 Capen Hall. For more information, contact Robert Bertholf or Michael Basinski at 645-2917.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web via UB computer accounts, contact the Computing Center Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Brenda Battleson and Cindy Seitz, University Libraries