Close Calls With Nonsense

Sometimes you have to know where to look; sometimes you just get lucky. That’s true in all fields of endeavor but it’s especially true when you’re looking for poems– new ones, old ones, familiar ones, potential discoveries– online: for example, tonight I needed to find a copy of Laura Kasischke’s “Black Dress” post haste, since my copy of her relevant book was in my office and I was at home. Not only did I find it: I found an entirely-new-to-me cache of poems from the past couple years, at a site called Poems 365. Like the far better known site Poetry Daily, the 365 people (really, one person, Steve Mueske of Burnsville, MN) looks at new books and puts favorite new poems on the web, slightly less, I think, than once per day (everything I’ve seen so far comes from 2006-07). I didn’t think I liked Maureen Owen, but a remarkably vivid poem by her is the very first thing on the 365 site today– and there’s a table of contents, too: check out the rest!