Website Wednesday

For last Wednesday, I was going to list a website which promised to keep you writing.

It was only a fairly large writing pane. You were to write in it and not stop for any length of time - or else.

Well, I don’t send out websites without trying them, so I typed in a sentence and sat back. Within minutes, the screen surrounding the writing pane went from white, to yellow, to pink, to bright red.

And I waited. Finally, remembering Theoden’s famous line at the beginning of the Helms Deep battle: Is this all you have to offer, Saruman?, I went on to other things.

Every day, I check Internet Archives for any new public domain movies and I saw that they had Ivan the Terrible. So I put on the speakers and that’s when I went searching for the howling cats.

Now, I’m probably slow on the uptake and you’ve probably figured this out already, but I clicked off site after site and still the cats were chasing me. It was seconds after I shut down Firefox that it hit me: that sound was the “or else” promised on the writing site.

But today, my website is just sweetness and light; no howling cats.

http://oldpoetry.com

This site has thousands of poems and I’m a sucker for poems - especially now that I have become such an expert in metaphor.

The poems are old and new and surprising.

I didn’t know that Hemingway wrote poetry and he wrote it just like his novels. Terse. And, I didn’t know that Edgar Wallace, famous for his novels of mystery and suspense, wrote poetry dealing with the Boer War, one of which, War, is here.

You can search by poet, by poem, by geographical area. Each poet has a short biography and many have notes and comments. Comments range from simple remarks to esoteric analysis.

There are essays and forums. There are poems of the day.

Membership is needed to comment but as a guest you can navigate all the sections.

Even if poetry is not your favorite literary form, take a look at this site. If just for The Age Demanded by Hemingway, which begins:

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.

and ends three brief stanzas later with:

And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.