Swindle
JA
August 20
I don’t usually blog much about poetry (mainly because I can’t tell my iambic pentameters from my hexameters) but this week one little project caught my eye. Swindle, the brainchild of Linebreak’s Johnathon Williams, is ‘a daily aggregator of contemporary poetry’. In other words, it basically functions by trawling through various RSS feeds to provide links to the best modern verse available on the web. Sources include publications such as the New Yorker, Slate Magazine, 42 Opus. RATTLE and Poetry Daily. The poems remain on the site for seven days before being purged and there’s even a handy tweet button if you want to share the joy. Williams described the program like so: ‘In concept it’s a little like Google News, if Google News had been built by a virtually unpublished poet using a second-string web server and a three-year-old book about web programming.’ Maybe, but it’s nice to see ideas like this that warmly embrace the web and all its glory, and promote some good writing along the way.
Also along the poetry vein, have a look at this grainy but impassioned performance by Allan Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, found via Bookslut. James Franco is set to play the Beat icon in Gus Van Sant’s new biopic, Howl.
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Comments
20 Aug 09 at 10:05
Heh. The Franco boy reads and writes. Well cast.
...20 Aug 09 at 10:07
Great find, Jess. I'm going to check out Swindle now. Also interesting to see Ginsberg in action. I've heard him more than I've seen him.
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