PT Recommends...
Tools to Use
You Never Know When You'll Be Trapped Without a Pen: Hopefully You'll Still Have Internet Access
RhymeBrain - An online rhyming dictionary with a plethora of unique features, including near rhyme and alliteration. Kate says, 'It loosens the straightjacket a bit with its offerings of unusual words, of elegant and pretty words, of its near-rhymes for those times when the formal poet feels like fudging [as I did just yesterday, deciding to go ahead and rhyme “bones” with 'combs'].'
20th-Century American Bestsellers Database - Despite it's unwieldy name, this is a truly exhaustive source for all things bestselling in the last hundred or so years. What makes this tool great is not the list itself, though that is impressive, but the in-depth research done on each and every book. Warning: the hours will fly by on this site.
Google Poetry Robot - Give it a first line and it will write you a poem. Impressive to see at work.
Poetry Forge - From the University of Virginia, an open source archive of tools to help young writers and their teachers find the right words.
Touch Poet - An iPhone app that, like magnet poetry, feeds you single word that can be rearranged. It draws words from Poe, Coleridge, and Shakespeare, as well as Digg and online news sources.
Feedly - Not a poetry tool per se, this innovative RSS reader is a great way to track poetry-related blogs and stories online. It syncs with your Google Reader and Twitter accounts for a unique experience.
DailyLit - Every writer needs to read. DailyLit will send digestible portions of novels and short stories straight to your inbox.
Audible - If even DailyLit is too much, you can always try Audible's incredible library of audiobooks. Audible has made a concerted effort in recent years to have classic books read into mp3 format.
Dada Poetry Generator - Another computer that creates poetry, but this one does so with Dadaist flair. Perhaps not as technically proficient as the others, but good for a laugh.
Visual Thesaurus - See synonyms mapped out visually. A great way to follow a word down an unknown poetic path. The one you see here could probably have helped out Wordsworth a little.
Translation Party - Based on Google Translate, this tool transfers a phrase you input back and forth between English and Japanese until the two phrases match. Hilarity ensues.
Cybernetic Poet - Perhaps the best computerized poet of the bunch. Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet is about the closest we've gotten to artificial creativity. This bot reads several poems and then writes its own in the same style. Check out the great example pictured to the left.
Lazyfeed - Not poetry specific, but a great way to view poetry blogs in a realtime format. Keeps things lazy by constantly updated without the need to refresh or click.
Rhyme Time and Perfect Rhyme - Two rhyming dictionary iPhone apps. They keep each other sharp through competition. Try them both to decide which one works for you.
Creative Commons - We're still surprised by how many people haven't heard of Creative Commons. This resource provides easy to understand ways to distribute content across the web that allows sharing and remixing. This site, for example, uses a Creative Commons license.
WriteRoom - Can't concentrate while writing on your computer? WriteRoom blocks out everything on the screen, leaving you with nothing but space and time to write. They've got a slick iPhone version to match, as well.
OmmWriter - A competitor to WriteRoom that does the same thing in a more zen-like way. Great ambient sounds and a more calming background. Unfortunately this one is Mac-only for now.
Choose Your Own Adventure - Ever wonder how those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' novels were structured? Take a look at this awesome resource that maps out exactly how these books work in a graphical format.
For Better for Verse - From the University of Virginia, an interactive tool for understanding meter in poetry. Allows you to graphically understand the meter in a lot of the most famous poems of all time.
