Pearl Diving Column
January 2019
by Ingrid Bruck
Diving For Pearls: Online writers' resources by Ingrid Bruck
Ingrid Bruck is a new editor at Between These Shores. She was a featured writer in BTSA Issue #2. This is her first column devoted to online writer resources. She found her own writer support community online. Writing this column is one way of "paying it forward".
Diving for Pearls: Online Writers Resources
BTS Books strives to be a writers resource. Toward that end, we invite writers to share their information, link, and news of interest for the literary community.
Email your pearls of resources for writers to:
Ingrid Bruck, Network and Resource Editor
JANUARY 2019
I was a life-long closet writer. I stopped writing in isolation when I retired. ModPo is where I got my start. This course helped me find a poetry community and introduced me to many of the writers and readers that support me as a poet today.
I’ve been taking ModPo since the class started six years ago. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Modern American Poetry. The teaching technique used is close-reading, a method favored by the program’s director, Al Filreis, a professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Director of Kelly Writers House which hosts ModPo. The ten-week-class surveys Modern American poetry from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman up to the present. The core course covers representative poems by featured poets and begins each September.
For those who complete ModPo (like me), we poetry lovers don’t graduate out of the course. There’s ModPoPlus to keep us engaged. We study additional poems written by authors featured in the curricula. And once we’ve finished ModPoPlus, there are special interest threads. This past fall, I joined The Global Study Group and Haiku Corner (I write haiku and thrived in this Discussion Group. An added plus, we wrote Renga together. The haiku party that started in September is still going strong. It's so much fun, we don't want to end it.)
This free online MOOC is where I met many of the poets who belong to my online writing groups. Early on, when ModPo ended in the fall, our poetry friendships didn’t. We continued sharing our writing and supporting each other by forming closed online writers groups. Two of the ModPo-inspired writer groups I belong to are online, global and still flourishing four years later. I have writer friends from ten nations.
ModPo continues year round in a Slo-Po mode. That’s where the class is now, much slower paced, less intensive. Every year I learn about more great poems by modern American poets. As I expand my knowledge of the poets and their work, invariably I learn more tools of the craft for writing poetry.
ModPo keeps evolving. It’s a class that develops global poetry community and keeps expanding. ModPo is my-place-to-go, it’s where I learn about modern American poetry. Or it’s for anyone with an interest in learning more about English language poetry.
Students from all over the world bond over poetry and keep coming back. That's part of the course dynamic. I’m in contact with the ModPo-ers I met at the start, plus new ones who’ve joined each year. The class is open, diverse and free. To me, ModPo's success is a stellar example of democracy in action.
ModPo enrollment remains open year round. Once enrolled, you can sample the writing resources and poetry treasures. Or begin a self-paced study through the course. Students have free access to class materials, videos and emailed ModPo updates.
Here’s the link to enroll in ModPo:
https://www.betweentheseshoresbooks.com/archives
Date Published: January 24, 2019