Statement of Purpose
The Poetry Porch is a place on the World Wide Web, a walkway adjacent to the main building of the humanities, but with a separate roof under which a few poets have gathered to exchange their original work and ideas about writing, where the accomplished can interact briefly with the aspiring, where the unversed can walk through and join the forum and continue on, where the Web-weary can pause for a few moments, as against the inside wall of a long hall with the side thrown open, look out at the accumulating and transforming array of poetic language and reflect on its beauty, variety, and usefulness.It is, broadly, an entryway to the unlimited domain of poetry, and a gate to fields of inquiry within the discipline of poetry. It is also a narrow colonnade, focusing on a small group of poets who are well-versed but underpublished.
It is a learning forum, parallel to the Stoa Poikile of Athens where Zeno authored the “porch philosophy” of the Stoics, a system of theories of knowledge, ontology, and ethics, etc. While this porch will not attempt to devise any such tightly organized systems of thought, it is hoped that it will take a hard look at the ideal as well as the concrete representations of the real world. A vantage point amidst the ever-transforming universe of knowledge, a meeting place, a classroom, a poetry reading, a place of conversation, the Poetry Porch welcomes formal and informal dialogue.
Joyce Wilson
January 1997
The Poetry Porch contents page.
Please send comments via email: Poetry Porch Mail