http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
Home of Poetry Magazine, Harriet Blog, and all kinds of poems. Browse poems and poets by poetic style, generation, or type of work. Nature poetry, political poetry, Beat poetry, they’ve got you covered. Articles and resources for improving your poetry. First place I turn for what’s interesting in the poetry world.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
Subtitled “A Poem a Day for American High Schools, Hosted by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003”. 180 contemporary poems you can work your way through, ranging from whimsical to pointed. If you’re ambitious, do a Google search for Billy Collins Poems on YouTube, just to hear how he reads them.
I love reading the back issues of this magazine. They generously make a lot of poems available to read online. The Conversations with poets are an interesting insight into the craft. A year’s subscription is well worth it.
You know those poems you hear read on NPR by a sonorous voice? That would be Garrison Keillor. Whenever I want to see if my poem is working, I imagine it being read in Garrison Keillor’s voice. Find the daily Writer’s Almanac and an archive of poems.
http://classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com/
Home of Classic Poetry Aloud, where you go when you need a taste of the old school poems. Dickinson, Kipling, Longfellow, Shakespeare. It’s where I go when I want to reconnect to my childhood and poems that rhyme. Some days I just need to see if I remember all the lines to The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Or Dickinson — All together now: “Hope is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul — And sings the tune without the words.
