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13 November 2004. My Big Idea for improving the lot of poets is simple. Get a million or two dollars to set up an Internet Poetry Center, which would be a state-of-the-art website with infinite storage space. Allow anyone to become a member of this center for nothing. As a member, he would be allowed to fill out a questionnaire. This questionnaire would ask him all kinds of questions about his poetry preferences--as producer and/or critic and/or consumer of poetry, as well as other preferences and whatever else trial and error determines will help make the profile obtained effective. The profile will then be compared with the profiles of all other poet-members' profiles to find which of the latter most closely match the given member's. The name of any poet whose profile matches the given member's profile closely enough will be e.mailed to the member, with links to his work, as well as links to criticism of the poet's work. Names of critics the member is likely to get something out of will be e.mailed to him, as well--with links to their work. This way someone interested in poetry who enjoys mathematics and abstract expressionism but who has never heard of me can log on to the Poetry Center, and find my poetry.
Contests in which members voted for favorite poems, essays, poets and critics, with somebody donating prize money for winners would seem a good idea, too. And members would be able to archive any poem they composed, and provide feedback about anything at the site.
Such a site would be easy to maintain, it seems to me, and would do indescribably more for poets than any organization supposedly out to help artists is doing right now.
Note: I find to my chagrin that no list of schools of poetry would be necessary. A new member could just type in the names of the poets he likes, and the computer program comparing profiles would do the rest. The program involved, by the way, should not be hard to write, I don't think--I'm sure I could do it myself, in fact, although it'd take more than a few months of trial and error to get it working optimally. I visualize a questionnaire that gave one taking it questions he'd answer with some number from 0 to 9. For example, he might be asked how much he liked the poetry of Frost, or of Silliman. The result would be a long chain of digits that should be easy to compare to other such chains. A pair of such chains would be given a number equal to, say, five points for each match of two numbers at the same spot on each chain, three points for each difference of one, one point for each difference of two, zero for differences of three through six, minus one for differences of seven through nine, and so on. The higher the final number, the close the match.
I do think an intelligent list of schools of poetry would be helpful. Then a member could be asked his opinion of each of them--perhaps assisted by descriptions of them and the names of poets in them. A formal taxonomy of kinds of poetry would also be useful.
No problem with me if someone uses the idea commercially. It'd be nice if I were given credit for the idea, though.
23 November 2004: Perhaps a better way to do the questionnaire would be to show examples instead of say "Do you like the works of x?" Show a poem by x and the reader selects an appropriate response which might be a numerical rating or maybe something less quantative like "I like lighter poems" or "I like darker poems". Anon
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