Looking for poems that "sing, rhyme, resound, syncopate, alliterate and just plain sound great?" Look no further than "From the Fishouse," the first anthology of poetry from the online organization, From the Fishouse.
From the Fishouse is a non-profit organization started in 2004 by Bowdoin Magazine Associate Editor Matt O'Donnell and San Francisco State University professor Camille Dungy as a way to promote emerging poets through the oral tradition of poetry.
The organization's name comes from the writing cabin of the late American poet Sargent Hall. In the cabin, Hall wrote the Faulkner Award-winning novel "Stowaway," and the O'Henry Award-winning short story "The Ledge."
When the cabin was rediscovered on Hall's property in 2003, O'Donnell received permission to move the Fishouse behind his own house and it is where he currently creates and maintains From the Fishouse.
The Web site is an audio archive that exclusively showcases up-and-coming poets, including thousands of audio clips of poets reading their own work.
"One of the reasons we started the Web site was so that people could hear more poetry instead of just read it," O'Donnell said. "We wanted to re-establish a relationship between the printed word and poems in the air because a reader often misses a lot of a poem if he or she doesn't hear it aloud or read it aloud to themselves."
The anthology is a compilation of selected poems that have been archived in audio form on From the Fishouse since its inception. It was edited by O'Donnell, Dungy and Jeffrey Thomson, an English professor at the University of Maine—Farmington.
Despite From the Fishouse's mission to emphasize the importance of reading poetry aloud, O'Donnell said that the written anthology, which includes an audio CD with clips remastered by Casey Latter '09, enhances the experience of listening to and reading poetry.
"You hear the poems out loud and they drive you back to the text so that you can examine the text more deeply," O'Donnell said. "It gives you a different experience."
The anthology contains nearly 40 poems divided into 10 loosely structured sections.
"They're a jumping off point for discussion," O'Donnell said. "We had to have some sort of way to organize the book so we organized it into 10 sections based on loose themes."
For example, one section is titled "To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire: Poems that Make Various Sorts of Address." The title comes from a work by poet Steve Scafidi, and the rest of the section titles also reference poems.
The anthology also includes two separate indexes to help readers make sense of the feelings and emotions they experience when hearing or reading certain poems.
In one index, readers can look up the poems they've read and see what poetic techniques the writers used when composing them, such as assonance or alliteration. Readers can also look up the definitions of these techniques in the other index, which also indicates what poems in the book use the defined technique.
"We wanted to show what the poet was up to when constructing his or her poems so that someone who is either studying the poetry, or is just curious about why a particular poem affected her the way it did, can look it up in the indexes," O'Donnell said.
On the From the Fishouse Web site, readers and listeners can ask poets questions about their poems, processes and styles. The editors took responses from these exchanges inserted them in the anthology.
"They give you an interesting look into the thought process of some of the poets about creativity in general," O'Donnell said.
The anthology was published in May 2009, but the three editors began working on it more than two years ago. Since O'Donnell, Dungy and Thomson don't live in the same place, much of the work was done through e-mail and conference calls.
Although "From the Fishouse" was only recently published, it is already being used at college campuses across the country. Professors at Princeton, Colby and Bates have selected the anthology for their courses, as have graduate programs at University of Virginia and Texas Tech University. Bowdoin professors may begin using it next spring.
"As these poems get into the classrooms, the students really seem to connect with the poetry because it seems a little bit more accessible to them than some of the other stuff that's typically taught when students are introduced to poetry," O'Donnell said. "It's a wonderful thing to see students engage with poetry on a deeper level."
Anthony Walton, Bowdoin's writer in residence, and Adrian Blevins, an English and creative writing professor at Colby, will read their works from the anthology at a special reading at Bowdoin next Wednesday. Emily Warren, a poet and a member of the From the Fishouse board of directors, will also be present to read.
Although launch events have already been held for the book, this is the first time the three editors will all be in attendance, which makes the event particularly noteworthy, according to O'Donnell.
One of the unique aspects of the reading at Bowdoin is the diverse coalition of campus organizations that have teamed up to sponsor the event, including the English Department, the Student Affairs and Student Activities offices, Residential Life, and the Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity. The wide range of sponsors correlates with From the Fishouse poetry itself.
"The book is representative of the Fishouse site, which is really incredibly diverse because we have no quotas or agenda except to put the best poetry we find out there on the site," O'Donnell said. "We were able to accommodate a greater range of voices and artistic styles than a lot of literary projects do."
"Everyone's been really enthusiastic about the event and I'm really excited that there's so much involvement from so many different organizations on campus," he added.
The "From the Fishouse" anthology reading will take place September 30 at the Schwartz outdoor Leadership Center at 7:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public. More information about From the Fishouse can be found at http://www.fishousepoems.org.