Dip into the Storehouse; let your creativity run free!

Earlier this month I put up a post at the Best American Poetry blog called Collaboration and remix, in which I aimed to explore some of the new and exciting things happening online where poetry is concerned: creative collaborations, the flowering of remix culture (in which one artist might respond to or riff off of another artist's work, perhaps in the same artistic genre and perhaps in a different one), videopoetry and so on. Behind the scenes, some conversations bubbled up. And today -- thanks to Nic Sebastian and other collaborators -- the Poetry Storehouse is launched -- a new edited / moderated archive of poems available (under an attribution / noncommercial Creative Commons license) for creative use, re-use, remix, transformation, etc.

Here's a glimpse of what it says on the "About" page:

The Poetry Storehouse is an effort to promote new forms and
delivery methods for page-poetry by creating a repository of
freely-available high-quality contemporary poetry for those multimedia
collaborative artists who may sometimes be stymied in their work by
copyright and other restrictions.

Technology has not just connected people and poetry and poets and
artists who weren’t connected to each other before, it has also changed
both the face and the delivery of poetry itself. Poems locked up in
hard-copy print editions only available for sale are struggling in new
and serious ways, while poems delivered in multiple creative ways online
have new leases on life and are reaching an ever-widening audience.

We believe that creative energy, like physical energy, is never
created from scratch, nor does it ever die, but continually morphs from
form to form as each of us is inspired by what has gone before us and in
turn inspire what comes after us.

A handful of poets (me included) have submitted our work to seed the new archive. (Here are my submitted poems -- and I'm chuffed to be able to announce that Nic Sebastian has already created a transformative work; she's recorded one of my poems, "Lunaria Annua," and it's delightful to hear it given life in someone else's voice and intonations!) If you're an artist looking for poetry to play with, the storehouse contains poems ready for use in visual art or music or video or whatever your genre may be -- and if you're a poet interested in being part of this great collaboration, you can submit your work for consideration by the Poetry Storehouse editorial team.

Also don't miss the Sample Remixes section of the site, which features links to some incredibly cool work already.