As National Poetry Month comes rolling along, the Electronic Resources & Systems department wishes to highlight a few resources with offerings on poets and poetry.
We hope all the poetry enthusiasts at University of San Francisco enjoy and make use of them!
Gale Literature Criticism
A go-to resource for more academic/historical needs and queries.
“Search” is available for a quick look up of criticism on any poet you may have in mind.
While clicking on “Browse Topics” and scrolling down to “poetry” unveils a wide host of available entries on historical groupings of poets and movements.
Gale Lit Finder
While also worth checking out, be aware full text for most poems by 20th and 21st century poets will not be available due to copyright. You will find many historical works available, however.
“Typewriter” by kruemi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Journal Finder
For accessing current and/or back issues of poetry-related magazines (as well as any other newspaper, magazine, periodical or other serial publication.)
Just type in a publication title.
You might try: Paris Review, Poetry, Georgia Review, Chicago Review, American Poetry Review, Obsidian, or Prairie Schooner.
On the Journal Finder results screen you’ll see the title followed by a list of databases with relevant holdings. Beneath the database link are dates of coverage available.
For instance, in the case of Prairie Schooner, you can see that several Gale databases offer access from the most recent issue back to Dec. 1991 while JSTOR extends access all the way back to the first issue from Jan. 1927! with a Full Text Delay of 4 years on recent issues (this means the most recent issues in JSTOR will cap off around or before Dec. 2000).
Meanwhile Project Muse offers access from 2003 up to the most recent issue, which happens to include “Marshawn” by Yalie Saweda Kamara. Basking in the principled refusal of running back footballer Marshawn Lynch to cater to media expectations during “Super Bowl XLIX Media Day, 2015”:
“the silences designated for your responses that never come. ‘I’m only here
so I won’t get fined,’ you repeat into the microphones and recorders”
See what other poems might be discovered! Happy browsing!
Independent Voices
An important online historical resource for small press poetry magazines, this open access archive offers full text searching available for a number of rarer Little Magazines, especially those from out the 60s and 70s in North America. Most of these earlier titles were previously only available in library special collections or from rare book dealers, often at steep prices. Now they are readily available to all.
cover image of Steve Abbott’s Soup courtesy of Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Notable titles in the Little Magazine sub-collection include those local to San Francisco, such as Steve Abbott‘s Soup, edited from out his one bedroom Haight apartment where he raised his daughter as a single gay man in the 80s (copies of physical issues may be found in Gleeson’s Rare Book Room); Ishmael Reed and former California Poet Laureate Al Young‘s Y’Bird as well as their later mag Quilt (edited from out the East Bay); and Kathleen Fraser‘s groundbreaking How(ever) focused upon women experimentalist poetry (edited while she taught at SF State); along with the seminal first issue of the Black Mountain College Review edited by Robert Creeley. Also see El Corno Emplumado edited by Margaret Randall, and Joglars edited from out Providence by then youngsters Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer .For more on Independent Voices, see our previous post.
Featured image: bookshelf above blog post author’s desk at work.