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A Poem A Day

With interest and enthusiasm, I've been following a blog conversation that I first discovered through Josh Corey's Cahiers about broadening the audience for poetry by working with schoolchildren.  I work for the education organization, Writers in the Schools (WITS).   Each year WITS celebrates National Poetry Month (April) with A Poem A Day, an outreach project that promotes poetry to the people. WITS selects a poem by our student writers to represent each day of the month and shares that poem through emails and by displaying the poems in local Houston businesses.  To sign up, send an email to mail@writersintheschools.org. WITS will email you a new poem each weekday in April.

Here's a sneak preview:

 

Two minutes

Me and my boys

Two minutes

in the hood

Two minutes

seen the haters

Two minutes

seen the colors of the rags

Two minutes

heard the buck shots

Two minutes

ran like fireants

Two minutes

My boys buck back

Two minutes

Lil Frank was gone 

Frank, age 12, Juvenile Probation

Zero by Robert Creeley

for Mark Peters Not just nothing, Not there's no answer, Not it's nowhere or Nothing to show for it - It's like There's no past like the present. It's all over with us. There are no doors... Oh my god!  Like I wish I had a dog. Oh my god! I had a dog but he's gone. His name was Zero, something for nothing! You like dog biscuits? Fill in the blank.         by Robert Creeley

New on the Blogroll

New on the blogroll and cool as can be:

C!b0rg5

collageworks

LITWINDOWPANE

Who Shall Doubt by George Oppen

   

consciousness in itself of itself carrying 'the principle of the actual' being actual itself ((but maybe this is a love poem Mary) ) nevertheless neither the power of the self nor the racing car nor the lilly is sweet but this

Get Levitated

Something that I stumbled upon.  The website is called Levitated.

Elusive Inspiration, Come Back, Come Back Here Now

I am not a full-time poet, and at times I struggle to find the desire to write.  If you face this demon yourself or even if you don't, you might be interested in psychoanalyst Adam Phillip's essay on inspiration. Here's an excerpt:

....And yet inspiration is a word no one is shy of using now, even though they are not that keen to explain how it might work. It is the kind of magic that people like to believe in, perhaps especially now, in a culture where money can buy virtually everything else of value, and science and technology can create or invent the things we most need. Inspiration, in other words, is a kind of God-term; it refers to something we think of as essential but that we can't, or may not want to, understand. As Eliot suggests, it is like a visitation from something profound and incomprehensible. It reassures us, or at least reminds us, that some of the best things about us are beyond our control.

Whatever it is that feeds us our best lines - the gods or God, the unconscious or the genes, the class war - it is something we depend upon but cannot command. Like God's grace, inspiration doesn't respond to our need or our greed for it. It is not a resource we can exploit; and it doesn't look as if, at least as yet, science or technology can help us get more of it.

Source: Observer, March 12, 2006

Senseless Acts of Beauty

If, when you are honest with yourself, you can admit that you often are entranced by graffiti, then check out the website Senseless Acts of Beauty.  The website allows people across the world to upload their photographs of found urban art.  Here are a few examples.  Scroll over the photo if you want to know the city of origin.

oPen 19 [OverHeaRd]

Write a poem consisting solely of overheard conversation.  (Source: Charles Bernstein, 66 Writing Experiments)

There are things

There are things you never really think about again, once you grow up.  Like crepe paper.  Unless you become a schoolteacher, of course.  And then you remember everything-- the smell of paste, the danger of quicksand.

How2 remembers Barbara Guest

How2 has posted a touching MemoryBank of Barbara Guest.  I enjoyed visiting.

in the rhythmic ... ceiling ... red flagged ... rag clefs ... notational margins ... the unfinished ... cloudburst ... a barrel cloud fallen from the cyclone truck ... they hid under a table the cloud ...

Linguasso

linguasso - dynamic emotional design

The web-based program linguasso (for lingual and Picasso) creates totally random works of art, composed of text and based on several different emotions. The program chooses an emotion, then displays associated words and dynamically created sentences in random fonts, sizes and places.  Each design seems to tell its own story.

Where to Share

If you are an alterer of books, here's a blog spot where you can share your favorite pages.  (Example = Changing of the Guard 33, Dan Waber & Meghan Scott)

Driven to Abstraction

Fantasy can become reality.  Now you can do it: Make your own Jackson Pollock. 

On the road to AWP

If you're going to be zooming down to Austin for the AWP Conference, please raise your hand.

Ripple Effect

flaming telepaths

check out: flaming telepaths by lauren levin over at gutcult.

photo credit: len bernstein

Kaleidoscopic

Want to let time be your sinkhole?  Make your own kaleidoscope.