Celebrate National Poetry Month by exploring today’s poets and poetry available from our friends at the living-breathing heart of the now: poetry portals. These sites bring to the 21st century a tradition of independently curating, collecting and publishing poetry that existed during the mimeograph revolution of the 20th century. Kin to the muscular-yet-short-lived little magazines that thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, they are realms of the extraordinary, offering what the poet John Taggart in Number 1 (1969) of his little magazine Maps, describes as
…Poems [that] are not on the furthermost borders of the avant-garde. They are of the now in the continuum sense of ‘being’ – eyes open, perhaps screaming, but not leaping out of the present, and occasionally, they are of the past as renovated by those open eyes.