As I was biking today, a squirrel ran across the road with a big nut in its mouth. Squirreling it away, I thought. Then I thought: sign of autumn. Then I thought: that means packing up for Tucson. Which means (I sighed to myself) leaving behind my shelves of poetry books for five months.

I’m grateful that my husband and I are able to escape the harsh western New York winter, which is bad for my health. And Tucson is luscious in the winter. But I do miss my hometown friends for that long time period…and my books.

When I’m in Tucson and think of a poem I want to re-read, or a poet I want to quote, I miss reaching up on my shelf to the exact spot where I know that poet is.

But last winter I began turning to the internet for finding poems. And to my delight, the web turned out to be an astonishingly rich resource. I’m going to devote this post to just a few of the many poetry sites I’ve found, knowing that even these are a miniscule fraction of what’s out there.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, hosts an immensely useful site. I went there in search of Jorie Graham’s “Prayer,” and there it was—along with fifteen more of her poems plus a lengthy bio. The site has multiple search options (including first line, category, and occasion), a poem of the day, discussions by contemporary poets, and links to other poetry sites and blogs.

The American Academy of Poets sponsors Poets.org, which features a daily poem and also has a search box for poet or poem. There are also fun features like an essay on poems about shoes. Jorie Graham’s “Prayer” is there, along with a few more of her poems.

You can tell that I’m drawn to the sites with search boxes. For me, that’s what makes the site useful, though I know that some readers enjoy the unpredictable surprise of the daily poem (the “grab-bag” game of poetry). These readers subscribe, say, to Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac,” which sends a poem a day to your inbox. But the poems aren’t archived on his website, so for me the site itself isn’t helpful.

But another useful one for me is poemhunter.com, with its search box and database boasting 310,931 poems from 24,752 poets, contemporary as well as classic and worldwide. Graham’s “Prayer” is here, along with 978 other poems with “prayer” in the title. For someone with the stamina to do it (not I), it would be a fascinating project to read all those poems and make some sense of what “prayer” means for different poets.

The site also offers an alphabetical search by topic: for instance poems about “shopping” or “suicide” or “swimming.” What I don’t like about this site is that it doesn’t name the book where a particular poem is published. My other thumbs-down for this site is the irritating ads flashing all around the page, one of which shouted out at me the last time I “visited” it. Not very hospitable, I thought. The disconnect between the ads’ aggressiveness and poetry’s inner reflectiveness made me cringe.

Quieter, with a dignity more appropriate for poetry, is poetrynet. The site was curated by Mark Jarman (well known to Image readers) for the decade beginning 1997. Each month features a different living poet, most unfamiliar to me. I go here to meet new poets and learn a bit of what they’re up to.

And speaking of meeting new poets: www.fishousepoems.org is a unique site, devoted to emerging poets and introducing their work in audio form. Live readings, live interviews, live Q&As at readings: these are the marvelous materials amassed at The Fishouse. What better way to “meet” a new poet than by listening to the poet’s actual voice? (Thanks to Maureen Doallas for telling me about this site in her comment on a previous post.)

Also grand for meeting new poets is Every Day Poems. A new poem is posted every day, with an invitation for poets to join in the various writing projects sponsored by the site.

There are even more websites for poem-searching, but I want to turn now to the poetry blogs. Correction: to a handful of the mountain of poetry blogs out there. WordPress.com alone yields 687,709 results if you search for blogs about poetry.

Among the blogs that offer poems by a range of living poets, one of my favorites is Kingdom Poets, called “a resource of poets of the Christian faith” by its blogger, D.S. Martin. Each post highlights a poet, giving a thumbnail bio and one poem. Recent posts were on Franz Wright, Thomas Merton, and Marianne Moore (who I’ve never thought of as Christian, yet Martin writes that she “was a devout Presbyterian all her life.”)

A different angle is offered by poet Brian Brodeur at How a Poem Happens. For each post, Brodeur prints a poem and then his interview with the poet about the process of writing this particular poem.

I’m partial, too, to Richard Osler’s website, which is a blog and more. The home page shows the book covers of some of Richard’s favorite poets; as you scroll over a title, you hear Richard reading one of the poems in that book.

Richard has been a regular at the Glen Workshop for years. He now gives poetry retreats in western Canada; info is on this website.

Whew. I know I’ve just scratched the surface. I bet you’re itching to tell me your own favorite poetry sites. Please do!