Poetry Community To-Do List
The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute is an independent forum created to provide a space in which fresh thinking about poetry, in both its intellectual and its practical needs, can flourish free of any allegiance other than to the best ideas. With this in mind, the Institute convenes leading poets, scholars, publishers, educators, and other thinkers from inside and outside the poetry world to address issues of importance to the art form of poetry and to identify and champion solutions for the benefit of the art.
Some of the ideas and questions generated or received at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, while worthy, are beyond the scope of the current Institute project. In order to capture and share these ideas and questions, we’ve created The Poetry Community To-Do List. It is our hope that a few of you reading this page might have the desire and ability to fulfill, or may already be fulfilling, some of these proposals.
The purpose of the HMPI is not to generate such a list; the list intends merely to capture ideas that come up during our discussions in order to serve and benefit the art form of poetry and the poetry community. Thus, the list is not exhaustive, and it does not prioritize the ideas or questions listed. Anyone whose curiosity is sparked by one of these ideas is free to use it or to pass it on to someone who might.
Ideas for future projects:
- Develop a variety of sample model licenses for poetry-specific uses
- Use the Faculty of 1,000 biology project as a model for reviewing poetry
- Identify resources for diverse poetry curriculum for different grade levels
- Develop categories of poetry lessons or topics that include downloadable reading lists and podcasts to support the various topics
- Identify the size of the potential archive or known corpus of poetry
- Offer awards for outstanding poetry teachers at all grade levels
- Develop an online space indexing historical draft poetry manuscripts for viewing by scholars and interested parties
