Utah Poet Laureate Katherine Coles doesn't want to walk the academic ivory tower. She'd much rather have a space in your e-mail tray, and 60 seconds of your time.

"Everybody has 60 seconds, even for a poem," Coles said. "If people have 60 seconds for a Pepsi commercial, they have time for a poem."

Sitting back to consider the project that would mark her five-year term as Utah's Poet Laureate, Coles sought a delivery medium as efficient as poetry was at compressing emotion. It also dawned on her that many of poetry's singular creations -- Shakespeare's sonnets and several Emily Dickinson poems included -- took 60 seconds or less to read.

Matching short poems with online delivery, Coles submitted "Bite Size Poems" to the Utah Arts Council as her Laureate project. Starting this month and continuing through the next 18 months, the project will deliver a new poem each month by prominent Utah poets into select e-mail "blasts" of 400 recipients the council hopes will spread in viral fashion to as many Utah e-mail trays as possible. Each recipient may trace the poem back to www.nowplayingutah.com, which will in turn link to streaming video of each author's recitation, revealing the poem's oral texture.

Guy Lebeda, literary arts manager for the council, has already launched the project with an e-mail "blast" of Cole's short poem, "Out Like a Lion." Coles and other Utah poets participating in "Bite Size Poems" will also officially launch the project with a May 20 reading.

Participating poets include Alex Caldiero, Rob Carney, Joel Long, Chris Cokinos, Michael Sowder and Craig Dworkin, whose four-second poem is the shortest of the bunch. Coles said she chose her roster from a range of poetry styles, including experimental and academic, and a mix of the two.

"My goal is that everyone within Utah will come within earshot of each month's poem at least once, or maybe even more than once," Coles said. "My hope is that as this picks up steam some of these poems will end up written on napkins in coffee shops."

As "Bite Size Poems" progresses, Coles said she will also introduce a contest phase allowing aspiring poets to submit their work in video recitation form or Twitter-size submissions of 140 characters or less. A panel of professional poets yet to be determined will judge entries submitted up until April 2010, next year's National Poetry Month.

"Slickness is not going to be our top priority. People can submit these from their cell phone cameras if they want," Coles said. "We're looking for originality and vigor."

Lebeda said past Utah Poets Laureate David Lee and the late Ken Brewer chose a high school tour and video interviews of Utah poets and writers, respectively. Coles' idea to seed the Internet with one poem per month represents a turning point, he said.

"What we're seeing now is the art form finding a new medium, and then the medium working on the art form," Lebeda said. "Too many people see poetry as having retreated inside the ivory tower, or shrunk on the printed page. This is a way for poetry to reassert itself as a language of culture."

The project also expands poetry's potential in Utah given recent budget cuts to the arts. The council hopes to publish a "print suite" collecting all poems spawned by the project if funds allow. For now, Lebeda said the council will at least reproduce poems on postcards and bookmarks.

Coles said it would be nice if her project led Utah's reading public into a longer, more permanent relationship with poetry of all sorts. "If these can be the gateway drug to poetry, so to speak, and some people end up thinking they're ready for Homer or Milton, great," she said.