Links

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STEPHEN’S LINKS

BOOK SOURCES

Abebooks	When I shop for first editions of poetry books or other out-of-print publications (support your favorite contemporary poets by buying their volumes new!), I usually search through all of these sources. Yes, there’s duplication, but you can electronically nose out an especially good deal sometimes. I search in generally the following order: 5
Alibris	6
Amazon.com	4
Barnes & Noble	7
BestBookDeal	1
BookFinder	2
Froogle	8
Half.com	3

ACRONYMS

AbbreviationZ

The A to Z of Acronyms and Abbreviations on the Net. A creative use might be for subtle acrostics.

ANAGRAM GENERATORS

Anagram Genius	Commercial software. The best in the anagram category. Well worth owning. For a parody poem, I encoded the name of a famous poet as Mr. Tankards. Can you figure it out?
Andy’s Anagram Solver	Of these three next online Anagram engines, try them all and choose your favorite
Brendan’s On-line Anagram Generator	"
I, Rearrangement Servant - or Internet Anagram Solver	"

FAVORITE DEAD AUTHOR SITES

The William Blake Archive	Everything Blake. Search the complete text of his poems in the fine David V. Erdman edition.
Borges Center	All about this incomparable author and poet.
Lewis Carroll	Everything you wanted to know, through the looking glass.
James Joyce	The Brazen Head: A James Joyce Public House The site talks in a feeble Irish accent, but the many links may help you to ignore that.
Wallace Stevens	Officially, The Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens web site, you can find links to get you started. One that amused me was to the Gavesite in Cedar Hill Cemetery. I would like to think the neologism was intentional, but alas . . .

CHIASMUS

Chiasmus

Everything you ever wanted to know on this charming rhetorical device.

CLICHÉS ETC

Businessballs	Origins and meanings of clichés, expressions, and words.
Cliché Finder	“Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use? Are you searching for a cliché using the word ‘cat’ or ‘day’ but haven’t been able to come up with one? Just enter any words in the form below, and this search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase...” “Over 3,300 clichés indexed!” Good for constructing complex image clusters!
Dictionary of Slang	English slang and colloquialisms used in the United Kingdom

DICTIONARIES

The Alternative Dictionaries	“The Alternative dictionaries are a collection of various forms of ‘bad language’ from many languages. At the moment, there are 2743 entries in 162 dictionaries.” All dictionaries are downloadable in PDF files.
BBC America	A British American Dictionary. “Feck! What are they saying? Find out by browsing our dictionary by category and region, or searching for a particular word.” Defines and explores Cockney Rhyming Slang. “In Cockney Rhyming Slang, a word is represented by a phrase that ends in a rhyme. For example, the word mate rhymes with china plate. So the phrase china plate represents mate. However, in spoken slang, only the beginning of the phrase would remain. So the word china means mate.”
Oxford English Dictionary Online	Unequivocally the best dictionary of the English language. Personally, I’d buy the CD, but if you want temporary access, you can subscribe for a low monthly rate of US$29.95, with no commitment.
Your Dictionary	Quick look up of a word in the The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language 4th Ed. Also has a robust translation dictionary where you can translate a word to or from English. Many foreign languages represented.

ETYMOLOGY

Behind the Name	The etymology and history of first names. Can be used in conjunction with Character Naming Software. Features name origins and means of names in many different languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Indian, Irish, and African
Esmerel	Are you gruntled yet?
Etymologically Speaking	An interesting sampling of words with surprising etymologies.
Krysstal	Lists words by categories: Words Created from Nothing, Words Created in Error, Borrowed and Adopted Words, Words Created by Subtraction or Addition, etc.
LGPN Lexicon	A lexicon of Greek personal names.
Online Etymology Dictionary	“The wheel-ruts of modern English.”
The Phrase Finder	Meanings and Origins of Phrases, Sayings and Idioms. Includes “nonsense” sayings, proverbs, phrases from Shakespeare, euphemisms, and phrases that relate to the human body.
Using English	Comprehensive links to all things etymological.
WordOrigins	Features a link to Biztechdictionary, their other site aimed at collecting and publishing reference citations of slang and jargon used in high tech industries.

GRAMMAR

Glossary of Linguistic Terms

Grammar. Shudder. But necessary for the serious writer. The study of grammar is boring, but anyone, with enough coffee to keep you awake, can master it. I strongly recommend the self-guiding series (three books or forms as they call it) The Least You Should Know About English by Paige L. Wilson and Teresa Ferster Glazier. Actually, any one of the three will do. One thought to keep you going: How are you going to creatively misuse grammar if you don’t know its basics?

LITERARY JOURNALS ON-LINE

*Agni*
Alaska Quarterly Review
American Literary Review
*The American Poetry Review*
*The Antioch Review*
*Apalachee Review*
*Arkansas Review*
*Artful Dodge*
*Ascent*
*Atlanta Review*
*The Atlantic*	Try their Poetry Pages, where you can hear prominent poets (who have been published in the magazine) read their own work.
*Bellevue Literary Review*
*Bellingham Review*
*Beloit Poetry Journal*
*Birmingham Poetry Review*
*Black Warrior Review*
*Bomb Magazine*
Boulevard Magazine
*Brooklyn Review*
*The Cape Rock*
*The Capilano Review*
*The Carolina Quarterly*
*Chelsea*
*Chicago Review*
*Cimarron Review*
*The Cincinnati Review*
*Collages & Bricolages*
*Colorado Review*
*Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art*
*Confrontation*
Conjunctions
*Crab Orchard Review*
*Crazyhorse*
*Cream City Review*
*Crosscurrents*
Denver Quarterly
*Ekphrasis*
*Epoch*
*The Evansville Review*
*Event*
*Faultline*
*Fence*
*Field*
*5 AM*
*Fine Madness*
*Five Fingers Review*
*Five Points*
*The Florida Review*
*FOLIO*
*Frank*
*Fugue*
The Georgia Review
*The Gettysburg Review*
*Grain*
*Green Mountains Review*
*The Greensboro Review*
*Gulf Coast*
*Harpur Palate*
*Haydens Ferry Review*
*Heliotrope*
*Hotel Amerika*
*The Hudson Review*
*Hunger Mountain*
*Indiana Review*
*The Iowa Review*
*Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing*
*The Journal*
*Karamu*
*The Kenyon Review*
*The Laurel Review*
*Limestone*
*The Literary Review*
*London Magazine*
*London Review of Books*
*Louisiana Literature*
*Lullaby Hearse*
*The Macguffin*
*Mad Hatters’ Review*
*Mad Poets Review*
*The Madison Review*
*The Malahat Review*
*Mankato Poetry Review*
*Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing*
*Many Mountains Moving*
*The Massachusetts Review*
*Michigan Quarterly Review*
*Mid-American Review*
The Midwest Quarterly
*The Minnesota Review*
*The Mississippi Review*
*The Missouri Review*
*The Modern Review*
*The Nation*
*The National Poetry Review*
*The Nebraska Review*
*The New Criterion*
*New England Review*
*New Letters*
*New Orleans Review*
*The New Republic*
*The New York Quarterly*
The New Yorker
*Nimrod*
*North American Review*
*North Dakota Quarterly*
Northwest Review
*Notre Dame Review*
*OnEarth*
*Ontario Review*
*Oxford Magazine*
*Painted Bride Quarterly*
*The Paris Review*
*Passages North*
*Pembroke Magazine*
Permafrost
The Pinch
*Ploughshares*
*Poetry*
*Poetry East*
*Poetry Flash*
Poetry International
*Poetry Ireland Review*
*Prairie Schooner*
*Quarterly West*
*Rattapallax*
*River Styx*
*Salmagundi*
*Seneca Review*
*The Sewanee Review*
*Shenandoah*
*Slate*
*The South Carolina Review*
*South Dakota Review*
*The Southern California Anthology*
*Southern Humanities Review*
*Southern Poetry Review*
*The Southern Review*
*Southwest Review*
*Stand Magazine*
*Swink*
*Sycamore Review*
*Tampa Review*
*Tar River Poetry*
*The Texas Review*
*Third Coast*
*The Threepenny Review*
*TriQuarterly*
*Valparaiso Poetry Review*
*Virginia Quarterly Review*
*Wallace Stevens Journal*
*Western Humanities Review*
*Willow Springs*
*Wisconsin Review*
*Witness*
*The Yale Review*
*Zyzzyva*

MARKETING

Poets&Writers

An essential reference to new literary journals, articles on craft, interviews with important poets and legitimate contests. New magazines are much less jaded and more receptive to new-comers. Keep up-to-date by subscribing.

ORGANIZATIONS

The Academy of American Poets	Find a poet, listen to a poem, links.
Associated Writing Programs (AWP)	Features articles from The Writer’s Chronicle.
Bookwire	“BookWire, the internet resource dedicated to new titles, new authors, and the general scoop on the book industry! Use this site to search book reviews, read about the latest releases, watch author video clips, and learn about upcoming book events.”
National Writers Union	“The National Writers Union is the trade union for freelance and contract writers: journalists, book authors, business and technical writers, web content providers, and poets. With the combined strength of 3,500 members in 17 local chapters nationwide, and with the support of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), the Union works to defend the rights and improve the economic and working conditions of all writers.”
PEN American Center	“An association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship”
Poetry Society of America	Very worth while. Seriously consider joining. “Whether you write poetry, read poetry, or simply want to widen your literary horizons, the Poetry Society of America has readings, seminars, and competitions intended to challenge and inspire. W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens were among the original members who envisioned a society that would not only be a local meeting place for poets, but a center from which a national poetry renaissance would emerge. Current members, such as John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Kimiko Hahn, Brenda Hillman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stanley Kunitz, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky and Adrienne Rich carry on their great tradition—and so can you.”
The Poetry Resource	Many, many links and resources for poets.

OXYMORONS

OxymoronList

An amusing list of oxymorons, adjectives and nouns which scrap with each other, like “healthy tan” or “Microsoft Works.” Best, these might get you thinking about this neglected rhetorical device for your own writing.

PALINDROMES

PalindromeList	A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards: like Nabokov’s distorted mirror universe novel ADA (in which he pays a compliment to Howard Gardner’s The Ambidextrous Universe, a work on physics) to “Ah, Satan sees Natasha.”
Palindrome Tester	Exactly what it says it is.

QUOTES

BrainyQuote	Explore, but these by Arthur Schopenhauer are a good place to start, such as: “Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.”
TwainQuotes	“Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources”
The Quotations Page	24,000 quotations online from over 2,700 authors.
Quotes	Some very zesty selections: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.” —Woody Allen “In some ways we know more about what happened in the universe’s first tenth of a second than we do about what goes on in the interval between ‘Your place or mine?’ and deciding who sleeps on the wet spot.” —Cecil Adams
Thinkexist	Famous quotes from a variety of sources. “How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’.” —Martin Luther

SHAKESPEARE

Enfolded Hamlet	By default, this link takes you to hamletworks.org. Click on Enfolded Hamlet on the left-side menu, then click on The Enfolded Hamlet edited by Bernice W. Kliman for her explanation. All the extant texts, from which modern editors cobble their editions of the “authentic” Shakespeare, are “enfolded” into one file. For instance: Q2 is the copy-text, but wherever a material variant occurs in the folio, it appears in the line. Curly brackets distinguish Q2-only elements and pointed brackets F1-only elements. Thus, in lines 586 . . . {from} <For> this time <Daughter,> 587 Be {something} <somewhat> scanter of your maiden presence to unfold Q2, read all the words with no brackets and the words with curly brackets. The Q2 reading - “from this time Be something scanter of your maiden presence” - is preferred even by editors who use F1 as copy-text. To unfold F1, read all the words with no brackets and the words in pointed brackets. The F1 line - “For this time Daughter, Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence” - is milder because its command For this time is provisional and because Daughter has a softening effect. The original texts have several long s’s, which the enfolded text shortens. The folio ends line 587 with a semi-colon and capitalizes “Maiden”; the enfolded text ignores these immaterial variants, while including the immaterial comma after Daughter simply because the bracket is already there. To get to the full enfolded text, at the beginning of her introduction click on: The Enfolded Hamlet is a child born of struggle.
OpenSourceShakespeare	“Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free Web site containing Shakespeare’s complete works. It is intended for scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind. OSS includes the 1864 Globe Edition of the complete works, which was the definitive single-volume Shakespeare edition for over a half-century.”
Shakespeare and the Internet	Particularly interesting (for me) is A Shakespeare Timeline, which gives the key events of Shakespeare’s life and work along with related documentary evidence.

TRANSLATION

FreeTranslation	This will translate sentences and phrases.
interglot	Translation dictionaries for Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, and Swedish.
The New English-German Dictionary	More than 190,000 translations in this new dictionary. You may use it online or download it.
OneLook	In one box, translate a word or phrase. “7,934,909 words in 974 dictionaries indexed.”
Word2Word	Language Dictionaries and Translators. Provides links for many, many exotic languages. Do you need to translate Bosnian to Swedish? No problem.
WordReference	Online French, Italian and Spanish Dictionary

WEBSITES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

Billy Collins	Links to various pages feature Billy Collins
Ronald Wallace	The personal site of a very fine, vital contemporary poet

WRITERS’ CONFERENCES

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
Squaw Valley Community of Writers	My favorite conference.

GENERAL

Arts & Letters Daily	“Philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, disputes, gossip” Today, what caught my attention was a link to a book review on TIMESONLINE: Pablo Picasso threw tantrums, was a tedious hypochondriac, and knew precisely how to hurt friends – among them, Roland Penrose...
Bad Poetry	“To achieve memorable badness is not so easy. It has to be done innocently, by a poet unaware of his or her defects. The right combination of lofty ambition, humorless self-confidence, and crass incompetence is rare and precious. (There is a famous anthology of bad poetry called The Stuffed Owl, which I recommend to those interested.) “For the student, having a genuine insight into the true badness of some poems is, I think, a necessary corollary of having a grasp of what makes good poems good. So these pages present some classics of badness: supreme achievements of the lame, the naive, the meretricious, the bathetic, and the sentimental.” Fun.
Glossarist	A searchable directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries, involving such categories as Biometrics, Art & Culture, Humanities & Social Studies, Science, Law and Justice, etc.
Great Books Index	“An Index to Online Great Books in English Translation” Not a bad start for accumulating an Reference folder on your own computer. I’d copy the text of these you find of use to your own computer and use them in conjunction with DTSearch.
The Literary Encyclopedia	“The Literary Encyclopedia is a constantly expanding global literary reference work, written by over 1200 specialists from universities around the world and currently providing over 3300 authoritative profiles, usually around 2500 words in length, of authors, works and literary and historical topics. We also list over 18,000 works by date, country, genre etc., and provide advanced software functions and tools. Knowledge worth paying for! Membership costs only $13.95 for a full year. We currently provide over 1m pages per month to around 500,000 unique visits.”
Literary Traveler	For literary tours, based on the author of your choice.
Luminarium	Website devoted to Medieval, Renaissance, and 17th Century Literature. I’m particular fond of the section on the 17th-Century Metaphysical Poets.
Medieval Text Sourcebook	“Full Text Sources for Medieval History”
The Modern Word	Main Collection includes sections on Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Pynchon. The site identifies itself as:“The ‘Omphalos’ or ‘keystone’ of The Modern Word, where history, contact information, and other pertinent links can be found”
The Nobel Prize	A page on Nomination and Selection of Nobel Laureates, plus facts about all Nobel Prize Laureates in literature through press releases, biographies, Nobel lectures, interviews, etc.
The Page	Poetry, essays, language, ideas, links to the major literary journals and a selection of new poems by major contemporary poets. Delicious.
Project Gutenberg	Free online electronic books. Almost everything Twain ever wrote, for instance. I’ve downloaded my favorites so I can search their contents using DTSearch (see my recommended software section)
The Pulitzer Prizes	Exact instructions on how you can win one. In your dreams.
Robot Wisdom	“One-stop guide to online e-text”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy	Free online encyclopedia. Of course, if you want the definitive Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Combined 10 volume set and CD-ROM with 10-user network license (Paperback), you can have it on Amazon for a pittance: $4,375.00. Hurry! Not many copies left!
Today in Literature	“Today in Literature is a daily calendar of engaging stories about literary history.” Famous literary events on the day that you check. Check it out.
Word Oddities and Trivia	A potpourri, with topics ranging from Palindromes; Vowels; Uncommon double letters, triple letters, quadruple letters; Beautiful words; Long words (chemical names); Names of people who became words; and the like.
Words in English	The history of the English language, the short course.
WordSmith	This link takes you to A.Word.A.Day. Today’s was “sticky wicket,” which the site will obligingly pronounce for you, if you have Windows Media Player or Real Player, which I despise. (Get Media Player Classic for playing all sound files in the Real format - Windows 2K and XP; it will save you being blunderbusted with advertising and bad code which loves to chew on your computer’s insides. Is that a mixed metaphor? Well, Real software inspires me.)
World Wide Words	My link cannons you directly to their Weird Words Section. Improve your vocabulary by increasing your obscurity. Perfect for poets particularly.