NaPoWriMo Countdown – Day 5

Five days until NaPoWriMo; I hope you are sharpening your pencils, dusting off your keyboards, and thumbing through your rhyming dictionaries.

It used to be that, in order to read new poetry, you’d need to go find a magazine that dealt in poetry, or perhaps a newspaper with an editor with a fondness for verse. Now, however, there are so many online poetry journals that you could spend weeks poring through them. There’s no excuse for not reading new poetry — it’s as easy as pushing “enter” on your keyboard.

During April, we’ll be featuring some presses and journals, including online journals, that have published NaPoets. But for now let me whet your appetite by pointing out a couple of places to regularly find new poetry on the web. First, the Pen Poetry Series brings us a new poem every week. But maybe once a week isn’t enough? For the technologically inclined, the Poem Flow App will send a new poem every day to your phone or tablet (you can also read online). And Poetry Daily, as its name implies, posts a new poem every day, generally from a freshly-released book of poetry.

All of these sources are great places to get a taste of poets you might not yet have heard of, and keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in contemporary poetry. Happy reading!