By Rich Barlow
For a quarter century, the Favorite Poem Project has amassed a sprawling video library of Americans reading and discussing their favorite verse. Many of these modern recordings of this ancient art can be found on the project’s website and YouTube channel, but many others “live in a static space unavailable to the general public,” says Annette S. Frost, the project’s director.
That virtual padlock has now been hacksawed. Observing its 25th anniversary, the project has unveiled a new website with a new Robert Pinsky Poetry Archive. Named for the project’s founder—former US poet laureate, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of English at the College of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Creative Writing Program—the online Archive gathers about 300 Project videos and 100-plus articles, including media coverage (The PBS Newshour, Slate), lectures and conversations from the University’s Art of Poetry MOOC (massive open online course), Pinsky’s online Poetry Forum, and BU’s Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Readings, which bring poets to campus.
The project’s physical archive of original letters, email printouts, and audio and video recordings, both raw and edited, are housed at BU’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. The online Pinsky Archive meanwhile represents cutting-edge tech preserving age-old ritual, its namesake says.
“In an unpredictable, amazing turn of cultural history, digital technology has found wonderful content in the ancient technologies of the human body,” Pinsky says. “The vocal presence of poetry and song, like the bodily presence of dance or athletics, adds a crucial human immediacy to our screens and databases.”
Pinsky created the Favorite Poem Project during his record three terms as poet laureate as a way to showcase poetry’s importance to Americans. The project’s website explains his premise that, “contrary to stereotype, Americans do read poetry; that the audience for poetry is not limited to professors and college students; and that there are many people for whom particular poems have profound, personal meaning.”
The project culled an original 50 video contributors from 18,000 interested people. “We aim to pull together these many videos, articles, and audio recordings into a searchable, online database, so that users of our current site, and those not yet familiar with it, will have access to a broad and diverse collection of poetry-focused resources for their own enjoyment or to use in the classroom,” says Frost.
“There are many poetry educators without much access to online teaching resources,” she says. “We hope both the Robert Pinsky Poetry Archive, as well as the other resources on our site, will help to fill that gap.”
“These resources are wonderful for poetry lovers, teachers, students, and truly anyone else. We hope that users will come away with the sense of pleasure that comes from this art, or with a better way to pass that on to students.”
The Robert Pinsky Poetry Archive is funded by the College of Arts & Sciences and BU’s Center for the Humanities.