“…COVID-19 immediately cut my workload by about half. This has allowed me to do other things I enjoy.” – dimitrireyespoet.com
As I am writing this, COVID-19 has been in New Jersey since the beginning of this month. It is now March 27th and I’ve rarely left my house since I came back from AWP in San Antonio, Texas on March 7th. For the first two weeks (approximately 14 days) I made sure to limit my outings to as little places as possible while being mindful as to not touch as many things as possible, just in case I were to have gotten sick or became a carrier of the virus while I was in Texas. After the 15th, I made sure that we were fully stocked for a good while with food, that a last few ends were tied, and finally I got cozy with my fiance and cat in our living quarters.
With that being said, many of my presentations and readings were canceled for obvious reasons and I even lost out on the opportunity to teach poetry in Newark, New Jersey’s premiere arts high school. But alas, technology has spoken and artists still need to gig to make a sufficient living (or to at least subsidize their income.) I speak about several ways that poets make money and since many of these involve being in the community the majority of artists are turning towards online resources to accrue money from their art.
My job as well, has decided to aid the community by offering free pdf downloads of two of our anthologies, as well as posting poems from our 100+ collections every few days. You can explore those two opportunities by clicking on one of the 2 pictures below.
With writers and institutions trying to bring the arts to those even at home, here are some resources I’ve found in the last two weeks:
Arts By the People
Arts By the People, as their name suggests is a program creating art by people like me and you. They’re a non profit organization entrenched in arts education where they also hold classes, workshops, and create a bunch of other interesting projects with the main goal of bringing it into communities for those to enjoy the literary arts, dance, music, and other types of expression.
Among their awesome projects are the multimedia poetry/video series, Moving Words, and their online literary magazine.
They also host an open reading series called The Platform and in lieu of not holding it physically, on April 1st, they’ll be hosting it virtually on ZOOM from 8-9pm EST and it should be an excellent experience. If you’re reading this before April 1st, 2020 and you’d like to sign up, the information for that, moving words, and the magazine are right here.
To join as a reader, please send us an email at platform@artsbythepeople.org with Virtual Platform Reader in the subject line, as well as your name in the body of the email. Each reader will have a time limit of three minutes.
To join as an audience member, please send us an email at platform@artsbythepeople.orgwith Virtual Platform Audience in the subject line.
Both readers and audience members will receive an email with sign-in details the morning of The Platform.
Coursera
Coursera is an online platform that has college level courses available online. For those who sign up, they can expect modules, quizzes, and some peer reviewed assignments (which are a bit hard to have fulfilled depending on the chance that not many people will be taking a class and/or other students decide to drop it. This puts you in the dreaded university “group project” scenario where your partners may be more distant than the run of the mill group project anchor.) You can even choose to pay for certificates as proof that you took the class to help build your CV. This can be an alternative if a college degree in creative writing isn’t for you or if you’ve already graduated but wanted to take creative writing courses anyway.
Coursera even offers some classes for free and I just so happened to find some poetry courses! The reviews seem to be fairly good, but I’ll say this— some of the course materials are structured to be a bit high brow and discusses the theory of the poems without discussing the theory of the writing process. So these classes are more on the academic side rather than the creative, but they’re still worth taking if you’re looking for general knowledge about the Modernist movement (which covers about 100 years from the turn of the 20th century, depending on what class you’re taking.)
I’ll leave the three classes I found for your perusal. What’d I suggest? I’d go with Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop, because the instructor is the only working poet I saw while researching such classes and he is also a big part of contemporary canon. Just as I said, the peer reviews are an atrocious lost cause, so if you do take it, take it for the information, not for the certificate.
*note* the date March 23rd, is the date I screenshot these photos. Some will be available now while others you may have to wait for.
Scribd
In a way, self-isolation has offered me a bit of a silver lining where it has forced me to slow down. I say “yes” to way too many projects & events and COVID-19 immediately cut my workload by about half. This has allowed me to do other things I enjoy, like reading (though I’m STILL putting more tasks in front of my reading, like writing book reviews and concentrating on Patreon.)
all the books I’m getting through in self-isolation
Screenshot from most recent online workshop. Would you like to take one? Fill out this submission form to find out how.
When I do get through my last chunk of books which hopefully will be soon, I will be turning over to Scribd, which has a great inventory of audiobooks and ebooks to download. They also offer the first 30 days for free, so if you’re at home and looking for some new reading material, you can sign up and start your 30-day free trial here. Then follow the directions when you click sign up at the bottom of the page
Teespring
Patreon
