Friday, August 29, 2008

Poetry Friday: Lost Poems

Well, this is cool. The Library of Congress has put out a web guide to finding lost poems.

While some of the first suggestions are obvious (Google!) and likely to provide instant results, I had fun reading down to the more specialized tactics, such as posting to message boards like Poetry Archives: Lost Poetry Quotations. And I can't wait to see what the British-staffed The Poetry Library has to offer---impeccable service, I hope.

Also, there's a section at the bottom of the web guide as to what to do if you've lost track of a poem submitted and published to a contest anthology. Apparently, contest poems are archived with the International Library of Poetry, and the Library of Congress is tired---wretched weary, if truth be told----of being confused with it.

Don't miss the lost novels section either. Children's literature is specifically addressed.

But back to poetry. I was going to post one of my favorite poems, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, but I see that our PF hostess today posted about it last month. (What fascinates me about that poem is that it devastates me each time I read it. I know it, I know it, I know it. And yet I read it, again.)

So today, I'm pointing you to Liz's post about lost things instead.

And asking you: have you ever lost a poem? I did once.

Poetry Friday
is hosted by Charlotte's Library.

8 comments:

  1. Fascinating! You've gotta love the Library of Congress.

    I think my early poems are all better off lost. :-)

    I love that one by Elizabeth Bishop, too.

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  2. What a great lost poems site! Thanks for the link!

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  3. Sara,

    Thanks for the link to Bishop's poem. I love it. It's great having all these wonderful poems online, isn't it?

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  4. Karen E: me too. The closest I've come is finding an old article I wrote for a local paper while I was in high school. "Wow, who wrote this? It's clunky," I thought, before I saw the by-line...

    Stories are different; I find lost bits all the time, nestled in between the pages of notebooks, in pockets of old backpacks, etc.

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  5. Oh, Sara. I love the way you write.
    I think we should all take a teeny bit of your post and turn it in to our own poem. I want to write one, for example, called Wretched Weary of Being Confused.

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  6. Thanks for the LOC link! It's stashed safely in my bookmark folder...where I'l promptly (probably) LOSE it!!!

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  7. Thanks to Google and other such tools, I've managed to track down quite a few poems I'd lost -- poems that I had read and loved once, but could only recall random lines and stanzas here and there. This is a great toolbox LOC's assembled here, and I'll look forward to using it to hunt down the rest.

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  8. Cool! Now if there the LOC would keep track of all my unpublished poems, that would be nifty!

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