meta: poetry and research

[dave_bonta]

I'd hoped to share one more poem here today, but I'm afraid I'm coming down with something that makes sitting upright nauseating, so let me try instead to sum up.

Will all the discussion these days of what the internet has done for poetry -- online collaboration, online workshops, one-click publishing platforms, communities such as this -- one rarely hears mention of the incredible boon that is the Google search engine. Writers can now fact-check as they write without leaving their chair. Even looking up words is easier online than in a paper dictionary. There's also a large and growing number of science magazines and blogs, not to mention great sources on mythology, history, and more -- lots of "gee whiz" stuff which, to my way of thinking, is just begging to be worked into a poem.

What are some of your favorite reference sources? I'm personally very grateful for Wikipedia. It may be inconsistent in quality, but one can always edit an entry oneself if there's something missing. Without it, search results would be dominated by sites such as About.com, which are much less trustworthy in general because of their advertising-revenue-oriented publishing model. But Wikipedia is by no means the whole of it. When I was writing the wildflower collection, my most reliable sources were all independent: a site on Illinois wildflowers, one from the Lady Bird Johnson Widlfower Center in Texas, the USDA PLANTS database, and a wonderful site compiling all known ethnographic uses of North American plants.

Could crowd-sourcing be used as a research tool? The one circumstance in which I've done this was when translating Spanish-language poetry for my blog. I'm far from a fluent speaker of Spanish, and I translate in part to figure out what a poem means. Twice I've resorted to Facebook, querying Spanish-speaking friends for their opinions on particularly gnarly turns of phrase, with very satisfacory resutls. I'm not sure whether that counts as research in the strictest sense...

Anyway, I'd really like to hear how you all have been using research in poetry writing. Thanks again for the opportunity to host here this week -- it's been a blast.

Comments

[ariestess]

Depending on what I'm researching, I use my friends and their knowledge a lot. Even if they just do their own brand of Google-fu to send me interesting links.

[alee_grrl]

Thank you for your wonderful posts. They have been fascinating and I have really enjoyed your poems.

I tend to use a vast variety of resources (both on and offline) in my research. Right now I spend most of my time working on legal research since I am a law student. While I haven't tried to directly utilize that research in a poem, one of my legal research/writing projects did result in a poem. However it was more inspired by the mind numbing workload and too much coffee than the research itself.

[jjhunter]

I use a mixture of Wikipedia/other wikis, Google/Google Image, and 'flist-wan kenobi' [friends' list Obi-wan kenobi] on social media platforms when I'm doing background research for poems under pressure. For most of my life, though, my poetry has been a byproduct of my research as opposed to the other way around. I can't not write poetry, but I'm still early days yet in terms of more purposive projects. What I do try to do is carve out a positive space for poetry in my everyday life: time to encounter new concepts and perspectives and to digest them. There are people I follow on Dreamwidth, e.g., who I can count on to introduce me to interesting tidbits that will spark my imagination - james_davis_nicoll, copperbadge, and ysabetwordsmith especially, among others - but I'm still expanding my repertoire in terms of other research. I'm split halfway between my academic resources (hurrah for research universities!) and the online communities I've embedded myself in when it comes to seeking out grit to create poetry.

In terms of interesting new spaces for poetry, have you encountered much in the way of gifs? I've just started to dip my toe into tumblr, and I've been seeing some really neat fannish creative work mixing text and a series of very short vid loops. (This BBC Sherlock-inspired one is not quite what I'm talking about, but it does pull at the imagination; this one is closer.)

I do most of my writing offline in a mini notebook - aka my portable brain, my pen-and-paper USB - but when I am writing with laptop + internet enabled, my tool of choice is the Dictionary application that came with my computer. It includes both Wikipedia and a Thesaurus, and there's something soothing about being able to track down the right word on the tip of my tongue within a few clicks instead of obsessing about it for ten minutes straight. I do miss Latin WORDS though (my favorite Latin-English-Latin dictionary program) - it's incompatible with Mac OS Lion, and not having it available at my fingertips is like having my thumb amputated off my phantom Latin limb.

Well! This has turned out long and rather rambling. I'll let it stand as is, since I've been grievously short of time to read & comment this week and was hoping to make up for that a bit today. Your posts this week have been a satisfying pleasure, Dave - thank you so much for taking the time to come and join us here at POETREE and share your work and perspective. I plan on adding one of your posts to the list of featured ones, but am having difficulty choosing which - they're all so good!