Guest Column: The Promise of Poetry in a Digital Age
For the past five years, Sourcebooks has been working on PoetrySpeaks.com, which will launch in beta Nov. 4. It’s a site we hope will tackle some of the problems that have stood between poets and their potential audiences.
The Web is ideally suited to problems of discovery. And on PoetrySpeaks.com, you can discover poems in a host of new and old ways by exploring three different sections: Two are curated (PS•Voices and SpokenWord), and one section is open to all (YourMic). Yes, you can search by poet and by topic, but you also can look at top-rated poems or the poems that the poets themselves believe are the best introductions to their work (“a poem you must experience”). Or you can look at the most viewed poets or the most downloaded poems.