There's been so much great poetry and book news this week that I'm struggling a little to keep up with it all! First off, an essay of mine has appeared in the newest issue of the online arts journal, Escape Into Life. I've admired the work of the editors and artists at EIL for some time, and it was exciting for me to get a chance to write for them. The essay has to do with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and with how literary mash-ups are a new form of literary criticism.

Too much poetry news is never a bad thing, but it does mean that choices have to be made about what makes it to the blog and what gets put off for another week. Today's post, however, was a no-brainer. A new tool from the University of Virginia Department of English, in partnership with their tech-savvy library, allows users to interactively assign traditional markers of meter to poetry. The interface, wryly called For Better for Verse, then checks your work to see if you've correctly assigned the stress, feet, meter, and rhyme. Screenshot after the jump:

What you see above is the partly-completed exercise for the first poem that 'For Better for Verse' offers. Down the left-hand side is a collapsible panel for filling in the rhyme pattern. You click above the words to add the symbols for stress, and on the words to add a line to divide the feet. Clicking on the corresponding symbols on the right allows you to check the various elements, and bring up the drop-down menu for describing the meter. The poems are sorted by title, difficulty, and type, and the selections span vast swaths of poetic history which creates a very full experience.

For someone who fondly remembers first becoming fascinated with the concept of meter and rhyme during sixth grade English, this tool is a delightful refresher of skills that every poet should have in the back of his or her mind. Though the UI could be a little more intuitive, the makers of this tool stepped up to the challenge of converting a traditional written practice to a virtual one with considerable skill, and the exhaustive glossary and help sections put all questions to rest. What's more, lightbulbs like the one you see in the screenshot lead to enlightening notes on the intricacies of the poem's meter.

This tool should quickly become beloved by all poetry enthusiasts, and for anyone who's ever though about writing a formal poem like a sonnet, it's an important and helpful resource.

My apologies for the very late post: this week has been particularly difficult on my schedule.

Today’s offering is a very cool little search tool and writing aid: the Google Poetry Robot. First out in 2006 but consistently updated, this tool from Geoff Peters uses Google searches to suggest words for poems. You simply type in the line you’re stuck on, and the robot suggests a new word. Geoff offers a published example on the site:

Example poem “Here in Canada”:
Mooing is more than just Breathing.
Clucking is sooo out of date.
Laughing is Healthy and crying is ignored but why?
I believe breathing is illegal here in Canada.
Writing the right words is always welcomed graciously
but those who believe that human wisdom
can do away with nationalism and religious beliefs
are truly inspiring but severely deranged.

-Geoff Peters and the Google Poetry Robot, 2006
Published in the May 2006 issue of High
Altitude Poetry.

He even offers an example in French as a demonstration that the bot works in other languages.

Now, I’ve used this a few times to varying effect. I highly recommend it if you’re completely stuck and need suggestions on filling in just one or two words in your poem. For writing a whole poem, I’m not so sure.

By typing in “In Xanadu” I can get the first line of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan through a series of clicks, but not too far beyond that. In entering lines of my own invention, I found that after the six or seventh click my choice of words became very limited and/or the same two or three choices kept coming up.

Though this may not be a perfect tool for writing a complete poem, give Google Poetry Robot a try for those times when you just can’t find that word that’s on the tip of your pen. I guarantee it’s a lot faster than frantically flipping through the dictionary.