Poets.org is the website for the American Academy of Poets, a large quasi-professional organization for poets (if poets can be considered to have a professional association, something that poets themselves would probably debate). This is an ambitious site that attempts to survey the national poetry scene, with a fairly strong bias toward traditional poetry and poets.
Intended Audience
• Poets
• People who identify themselves as poetry lovers
• Teachers interested in using poetry in the classroom
• People who need a pithy quote
Usefulness of Content
• Poets.org includes links to the full text of individual poems, to individual poet pages (which include biographies and links to poems). You can search by poet or by poem, which can be confusing, since a poet may have a poem included in their database but not be included in the general list of poets whose names you can click on. Author biographies are not necessarily up to date, making this website not especially reliable for author information. Their database also includes essays and interviews by or about significant poets, information about the AAP and their events, ways to donate, and a section featuring poetry recommendations for teaching. There is a limited amount of craft information on how to publish which is clearly intended for would-be poets and not experienced writers.
• You can subscribe to poets.org and save poems, biographies, essays etc. in a “notebook” or multiple notebooks, allowing you to personalize the site in a way. You can also listen to audio recordings of poets reading their poems, many of which can be purchased on CD. The site also has a section called “Life Lines,” where people are able to contribute poems they find particularly meaningful along with explanations for their choices. This section includes links to the AAP’s related podcast.
• One interesting feature is their “For Educators” column, where poetry suggestions for teaching are divided into two areas: poems whose texts are available on this website and poems available elsewhere. The poems offered are not especially challenging, and it’s unclear who the intended audience of teachers are: schoolteachers? Teachers of creative writing? English professors?
• The site also includes the AAP’s National Poetry Map (a clickable map) and invited users to contribute event listings on the state and local level, names of poetry-friendly bookstores in each state etc. These pages look nice, and each state features a list of “most popular” poets in each state, based on hits on their site from that state. This tells you almost nothing, though, since the lists are tend to be pretty similar from state to state (the lists from Hawaii and North Dakota are remarkably alike). The site doesn’t function well as an event listing site, but the state sites do include useful information about journals and creative writing programs in each state.
Consistency of Design
The design is very consistent. It could be more striking, but in some ways its understated design matches the poetry it is promoting—the AAP is going for a kind of genteel populist stance toward poetry (think Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac) and this design reflects that.
Ease of Navigation
The site contains a lot of information and multiple ways of searching, but the design generally doesn’t feel overly cluttered. It is confusing sometimes to understand what you are searching for and where, but generally the AAP seems to have created a number of usable interfaces for their poetry/poets database information.
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