The catalog is a great way to search for poets and poetry in the library. You can search a number of resources all at once, like books on our shelves, ebooks, scholarly and popular articles online, and Open Access resources (research-worthy, free items online).
To search poems by author/creator, enter their name into the search box; if the poet has a very common name, you may have to add AND poet* so that your results are related to poetry. For example, "Jennifer Smith AND poet*" Be mindful of spelling and alternate names of the poet. You may want to try a web search to verify how their name is spelled.
Did you notice the asterisk (*) after the word "poet" above? That asterisk indicates truncation; it's a way to search catalogs and other library research tools for the root form of a word and all of the possible endings for that word. So poet* would return both poets and poetry, because they both start with poet.
Unless the poem is of a substantial length or very well-known, a specific poem would be best searched by author. Try a web search if you are not sure of the poet's name, or you can always ask a librarian for help.
To search for poetry on a certain topic, try the OneSearch catalog's Advanced Search. Here you can search for specific terms in the subjects of items in our collection. Subjects describe an item's content as a whole and really help to focus a search. Enter a word or phrase for a subject describing the type of poetry you are searching for, and add a new line with poet* as a subject.
An advanced search for poetry about California using OneSearch
If you do not retrieve many results, you can try a basic search for poetry on a certain theme or topic. Instead, enter poetry AND [your topic] into the search box at the top of the page. For example, "poetry AND India," or "poetry AND war." A basic search is not very precise, but it should help you retrieve more results.
The library uses the Library of Congress classification system to organize books in the library. This system makes it somewhat challenging to simply browse for poetry on the shelves; poetry will be scattered around a substantial part of the P section (Language & Literature). Searching the catalog using the strategies above will be your best way of finding poetry that interests you, but if you would like to try to browse, you may want to focus on the following call numbers. You may also browse the LoC P class [PDF] outline for an idea of where to search the literature area to find specific types of poetry.
One last hint; when browsing these areas, aside from anthologies and compilations, many poetry books are a lot smaller than most other books on the shelves!
