The Poetry Archive is an ambitious project whose aim is to collect, catalogue and make freely available recordings of poets reading their own work. Its scope is largely American and English poetry but this is due to what recordings are available. The program hopes to include more global representatives as time goes on though the archive does limit the scope to English‐language poetry.
The Poetry Archive is well organized and easy to navigate. It is possible to search poem titles, author names or even themes while also providing a glossary of poetic terms and concepts. This encourages browsing and exploration, discovering poets and their recordings serendipitously. The benefits of title and author search are self‐evident but the ability to list by theme would allow researchers to find similar resources by tone or content. The user can also explore poems by type such as haiku, ballad or quatrain. The layout is aesthetically appealing, making navigation easier and more intuitive. A user can create a free login to save resources, create their own lists of recordings and so on. It also allows the user to participate in the online discussions and leave comments.
This resource would be useful for students in upper‐level high school English courses through post‐undergraduate literature researchers. The archive is something of a poetry index because it includes the text of the poem along with the author's recorded reading. It also provides some basic biographical information about the author and some small background content. The recordings are of mainly contemporary authors from mid 1900s to the present day. Again, these recordings are based on what is available.
The archive has sections designated for students, children and teachers each with a different focus. The teacher section has suggestions and lesson plans that help educators incorporate the archive resources into the classroom. The focus for the teacher and student sections is focused on high school and beyond but could be used for some lower levels as well. The children section is very similar to the rest of the archive but is built to be aesthetically pleasing to younger users and focuses on poets who write about or for children.
In addition to the poet selections, the student section provides links to other poetry research web sites, tips on reading and listening to poetry and the Poet in Residence section. Poet in Residence is a blog‐archive that allows the current archive poet to create blog posts about their work or other poetry related topics which would hopefully encourage conversation and discussion among users. These conversations and blogs are retained as an archive that can be freely accessed. This potentially gives researchers and students direct access to a published poet.
The Poetry Archive is a unique resource because of its freely provided content but it relies on charity funding. The amount of funding is one factor that determines which recordings are included in the archive. They also rely upon a rotating board of writers and critics, often specializing in a particular area, to help determine what poems to include and how to categorize the work. A list of the current editors and administrators is located under the About Us tab. The editors make it clear that a decision whether or not to include a given author is not a comment on the author's work but more on what is economically feasible. The editors understand that while they want to have every possible recording, it is an unending task made possible through donations from users and interested groups.
The Poetry Archive is a very noble enterprise and hopefully will have enough support to continue its goal and succeed insofar as such a resource with so far‐reaching an objective could. Making poetry more available is in itself a laudable aim but taking it one step further, allowing the reader to hear the poem as the poet hears it creates a unique avenue for readers to develop a greater understanding of the genre, of the work and how poetry is meant to appear. The archive would be a great asset not only to English literature students and researchers, but also to libraries of any stripe.
