Poetry, Alive

Media Dietician Ken Gordon recently turned me onto a new "totally insane Web project" called Quickmuse, an improvisational poetry Web site that appears extremely progressive and promising.

We take well-known poets (Robert Pinsky, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy), throw them a provocative quote, and give them 15 minutes to write something. Our special Quickmuse technology -- we call it the Poematic -- captures the poem as it emerges, second by second, onto the Net.

The first two outings, by Muldoon and Thylias Moss, read extremely well. It'll take me awhile to get used to the countdown feature -- you can read the poem as it was written, side by side with a clock ticking down from 15 minutes -- but on the whole, what a neat idea!

Ken expands on some of the ideas behind the project in a recent piece for Poets & Writers magazine. Make with the clicky. And if you know any poets who might be interested, I'm sure you could introduce them to Ken -- and Quickmuse.