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*" Note spelling differences and alternate names for a poet. You may want to try a web search to check variations.
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.
While "poetry" is the most obvious choice for keywords to start a search on this topic, remember that there are word variations and synonyms to try, too. Poem* and also verse (probably accompanied by another related term like literature, fiction, or writing) are also potential keywords to try in a search.
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 a 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 narrow your search.
Enter a word or phrase that describes the topic of poetry being searched, 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 search Any Field for a topic instead of within the subjects.
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 prefer 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/slimmer than most other books!
