Poetry Resources
This page is a gathering of resources I’ve found useful, grounding, or simply full of wonder throughout my life with poetry. Some are places I return to again and again when I need to remember why I write. Others have introduced me to poets I now carry with me always.
Whether you’re a lifelong reader, a new writer finding your voice, an educator building a syllabus, or someone who stumbled here by accident (hello!), I hope you find something here that opens a door. This is not a comprehensive list—just a living one. I’ll keep adding to it as I go, and if there’s something you love that’s not here yet, feel free to write me. Let’s keep sharing what keeps us company.
Between the Covers by David Naimon
Produced through Tin House, Between the Covers is a beautifully attentive literary podcast offering long‑form conversations with writers across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Since its 2012 launch, host David Naimon has crafted deeply generative interviews—often seen as a “beautiful portal” that leaves listeners feeling “more attentive readers” and “hopeful humans.” Each monthly episode dives into a writer’s creative journey, exploring their latest works with care, curiosity, and an ease that feels intimate yet broad in scope—whether the guest is a celebrated poet, a debut novelist, or a nonfiction storyteller. It’s a generous, thoughtful space for anyone who loves literature: for moments of quiet reflection, expansive conversation, and the reminder that every book lives inside a world of intentions, influences, and long arcs of practice.
Emotional Historians by Jon Sands
Emotional Historians is a six‑week, generative poetry workshop led by Jonathan Sands—author of It’s Not Magic—designed to help writers of all levels craft poems that truly reflect the messy, layered truths of our lives. Meeting in small, highly interactive Zoom classes (about 20 people), each session combines close reading, generative prompts, and brave sharing in a supportive space. Jon encourages us to become “emotional historians” of our own time, asking not just, “Is this a great poem?” but “Is this today’s poem?” The workshop runs on a sliding scale with scholarships available, and has enrolled over a thousand participants since its launch in March 2020—evidence of how deeply it resonates with poets seeking community, rigour, and heart.
In Surreal Life by Shira Erlichman
In Surreal Life is a month‑long, global creativity school run by Brooklyn-based poet, musician, and artist Shira Erlichman—best known for her collection Odes to Lithium. It pairs daily writing prompts with heartfelt community-building, intimate core groups, and live (and recorded) sessions featuring visiting poets like Kaveh Akbar, Fatimah Asghar, and Danez Smith. Open to writers everywhere (with sliding-scale tuition and free spots for BIPOC scholars), ISL is less a workshop and more a practice of radical generosity—where you risk, share, grow, and remember why you write, all within a tender web of companionship and collective wonder.
Jacket2
Jacket2 is a daily, engaged online forum hosted at Penn’s Kelly Writers House that celebrates the vibrant pulse of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. It is a generously annotated listening-room-meets-classroom, perfect for readers, teachers, and writers hungry for a deep, thoughtful take on where poetry is—and might be headed.
Midst Press by Annelyse Gelman
Midst Press is the revolutionary digital publishing platform founded and directed by poet Annelyse Gelman, offering readers an unprecedented look into how poems are created—draft by draft, pause by pause—with interactive “timelapse” visuals that map a poem’s evolution from blank page to finished work. Emerging in 2019, Midst lets writers and readers alike witness every revision—highlighting poetry not just as finished art, but as a living, time-based performance of discovery and experimentation.
ModPo
ModPo is a free, open-access online course offered by the University of Pennsylvania and led by the extraordinary Al Filreis. It’s a generous, ever-evolving community of readers, thinkers, and poets exploring modern and contemporary American poetry together. Whether you’re new to poetry or returning with a fuller heart, ModPo invites you to read deeply, listen closely, and join in real-time conversations that stretch across the world. I first joined in 2012, and it changed everything for me—how I read, how I write, how I move through the world. It’s one of the truest gifts on the internet.
PennSound
PennSound, housed at the University of Pennsylvania and co‑directed by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, is the world’s largest free online archive of poets reading their own work—a lively, ever‑growing digital library with over 50,000 MP3s from more than 1,500 poets, spanning a century of voices. Featuring everything from T. S. Eliot’s rare 1930s campus recordings to contemporary readings, curated podcasts, radio series, and video features, PennSound invites listeners—whether students, teachers, or curious hearts—to experience poetry as it’s meant to be heard. Rooted in a manifesto of accessibility and care, it champions free, high-quality downloads, rich metadata, and meticulous categorizing for poets and educators alike. Whether you’re teaching, studying, or just longing to hear your favourite poem spoken aloud, PennSound is a generous listening room that spans eras and styles—your invitation to return again and again.
UbuWeb
UbuWeb began in 1996, founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, as a humble repository for visual and concrete poetry and quickly blossomed into one of the largest and most eclectic archives of avant-garde art online—including sound poetry, experimental music, literature, film, video, and more—all freely downloadable and entirely non-commercial. Operating on a gift‑economy model—no ads, no paywalls, no permission-seeking—UbuWeb is lovingly maintained by volunteers and sustained by donated server space and bandwidth, with the explicit mission of rescuing marginalized, out-of-print, or hard-to-find materials. It’s less a polished library and more a radical “wunderkammer” of creative impulses—where a silent John Cage piece sits alongside concrete poems, underground films, and ethnopoetic texts—inviting both curiosity and collage. Though it briefly paused archiving in early 2024, it reactivated in February 2025 in response to a global political moment and the urgent need to preserve cultural memory. Whether you’re teaching, researching, writing, or simply wandering through artistic depths, UbuWeb offers a handcrafted, generous, and irrepressibly creative space to explore process, voice, and form.
VS Podcast
VS is a bi‑weekly podcast that invites writers to “confront the ideas that move them” through long-form conversations that are as rigorous as they are joyful. Weaving together discussions of craft, identity, politics, and pop culture, this is poetry grounded in lived experience, unfiltered laughs, honest vulnerability, and deep care—ideal for anyone who wants poets to speak with soul, rage, humour, and hope in equal measure.