The Room for Debate blog at the New York Times featured a very interesting discussion this week about the choice that Cushing Academy recently made to dispense with all the books in their library. If you didn't hear, the school recently made the choice to get rid of the books in their collection [mostly donating them to community organizations]. They're now using the space for a 'learning center' that focuses primarily on electronic resources.
Solitude, Snow Days, and Rainer Marie Rilke
Having been homebound now for far longer than I would like, there are two things I've come to appreciate greatly: the first is solitude, and the second is the Internet.
Soldiers Blog Their Way to Great Poetry
Pimp My Book: A Hardcover for Your E-Reader
It seems some products are made just for this blog. If you're a regular reader, you're sure to love the BOOK. With a time-honored name, this product will protect your Kindle, Macbook, or iPad while styling it in a way that may be just a little familiar to you. Take a look after the jump:
Century-Old Poetry Society of America Finds Fulfillment Online
You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but poets have no trouble learning new things. There's no better example than the New York-based Poetry Society of America, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The PSA has long been a great supporter of poems and poets across the country, and in the past few years it has embraced the online world wholeheartedly.
The New York Times Flirts with Openness and Can't Make Up Its Mind
This is undoubtedly an important tech story, but alone it doesn't have much to do with poetry. A few days ago we intended to publish an article on this blog pointing out the vast amount of metadata the Gray Lady released beginning last year on data.nytimes.com. This is basically an online version of the fantastic New York Times Index, which is essentially a list of all the topics used in the newspaper going back decades. It's an important document for vocabulary in American English, and certainly having this information available as linked open data, along the lines of Project Gutenberg, is something of interest to anyone who deals in words.
'For Better for Verse': Learning Meter Interactively
There's been so much great poetry and book news this week that I'm struggling a little to keep up with it all! First off, an essay of mine has appeared in the newest issue of the online arts journal, Escape Into Life. I've admired the work of the editors and artists at EIL for some time, and it was exciting for me to get a chance to write for them. The essay has to do with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and with how literary mash-ups are a new form of literary criticism.
Too much poetry news is never a bad thing, but it does mean that choices have to be made about what makes it to the blog and what gets put off for another week. Today's post, however, was a no-brainer. A new tool from the University of Virginia Department of English, in partnership with their tech-savvy library, allows users to interactively assign traditional markers of meter to poetry. The interface, wryly called For Better for Verse, then checks your work to see if you've correctly assigned the stress, feet, meter, and rhyme. Screenshot after the jump:
Too much poetry news is never a bad thing, but it does mean that choices have to be made about what makes it to the blog and what gets put off for another week. Today's post, however, was a no-brainer. A new tool from the University of Virginia Department of English, in partnership with their tech-savvy library, allows users to interactively assign traditional markers of meter to poetry. The interface, wryly called For Better for Verse, then checks your work to see if you've correctly assigned the stress, feet, meter, and rhyme. Screenshot after the jump:
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