Solitude, Snow Days, and Rainer Marie Rilke

Today is Day 6 of what they're calling Snowmageddon [or at least that's what Twitter is calling it. You can also find it under the hashtags #snowpocalypse, #snoverkill, and my personal favorite #snowfecta]. I have been trapped in my apartment for the entirety of the storm, save for the brief lull yesterday afternoon when my roommate and I managed to escape to retrieve some more groceries and a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts. My case is not by any means an uncommon one. If you live anywhere between DC and New York chances are you've been affected heavily by this storm. Though weather reports have a tendency to report these sorts of things in an overblown manner, I can honestly say that most of the reports of the trouble caused by this storm are quite accurate.

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

A very good article appears in the New York Times today covering US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who have written amazing poetry, fiction, and memoirs about their experiences of the two wars. This is not the first time soldiers have written about the battlefield: the Bello Gallico and All Quiet on the Western Front are two good examples. But the article does a great job getting to why today's soldiers feel compelled to write. Its explanations of the themes these authors explore was illuminating for me.

'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:

The Poet and the Journalist: Two Reflections for You to Ponder

I somehow don't think it's a coincidence that the words 'the poet and the journalist' have precisely the same sing-song quality as Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'. It's interesting to think how these two types of writers bumble about each other, even in today's highly communicative world.

Since we're all in our blissful post-Christmas state at the moment, I thought I would share two reflections on the same issue: one by a journalist and the other by a poet. I think you'll find, like I did, that these thoughts are two sides of the same coin.

Magnet Poetry on a Virtual Fridge

My fridge is currently covered with two Magnetic Poetry sets. My roommate and I are constantly updating the arrangements throughout the day, and whenever anyone comes to our house they put their two cents in. It's a nice way for us all to interact nonverbally. Every time I go for a glass of water I'm surprised by a new combination.

It's crossed my mind more than once that I'd really like all of the poets on the internet to be able to participate in this kind of silent collaboration. As I've talked about before, the iPhone app Touch Poet allows us to make our own 'magnetic poetry' and post it to social networks. But with an interface like that, we don't get to work from the same pool of words.

Technological Literacy: The Most Important Gift We Can Give to Children

Few things are as inspiring as watching a kid soak up information. They can process new ideas and concepts at a staggering velocity. From a young age, the children of the world are bombarded with things to learn. These learning experiences come from a wide range of sources: for starters there's the education system itself, the ubiquitous advertising industry, and the unparalleled influence of parents. Despite the positive or negative influence of these large-scale educational efforts, there's a much deeper education going on behind the scenes. Both implicitly and explicitly, kids learn on their own, and they teach each other what they know.

For the better part of the last three decades, that's the main way kids have learned about technology. Like sex education in the 1950s, technology in the 80s and 90s was a subject most parents hardly ever broached with their children, and was only taught in schools in the most broad, generic terms.

The Poetry Foundation Tells Us All to Take a Walk

To start us off, I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, even those of you who do not live in the US. Regardless of whether or not you celebrated the holiday, I hope you took the time, like I did, to listen to the stories, jokes, and perhaps even poems of your friends and family.


Now that we're all back and refreshed from this most gustatory of celebrations, I'm sure we could all use a nice long walk to get rid of those extra pounds. Well, our friends at The Poetry Foundation have us covered.  They've recently kicked off an exciting new walking tours project in both DC and Chicago.

Fear and Loathing in Azeroth: Is WoW Stealing Writers from the World?

[n.b. Though many posts on this blog are more serious, this one sets my tongue firmly in my cheek.]

Many writers are born from the depths of obsession, addiction, and neurosis. Think about the man pictured here, Hunter S. Thompson, who Wikipedia describes as 'known for his use of psychedelics, alcohol, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism'. [Let me say, before going any further, that I love the way the author of that entry puts it in that order specifically.] Thompson is the very best example of an obsessive author, but there are plenty of others: Hemingway, Beckett, Kesey, and Plath just to name a few.

Some would even go so far to say that obsession and writing go hand in hand. If that is the case, I wish to alert you all to a potential problem:

I speak of course, of the game World of Warcraft. Now I'm sure many of you play this game and know others who do. If you're familiar at all with it, you know it is an all-encompassing uber-obsession capable of turning normal, decent people in hopeless addicts almost overnight. We've all seen it: bloodshot eyes, chip crumbs, can after empty can of red bull.

As a writer, it is time I put my foot down. How dare you, gamers, steal our obsessive thunder? Hopeless addiction, unmatched obsession, and complete clutter has been the purview of writers for thousands of years. Now you come along with your night elves and your lich kings to lure an entire generation away from being shut-in authors to being shut-in gamers.

Enough, I say! Would Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas have been written if Hunter's guild had a raid? Probably not. Would Jack Kerouac have been able to write On the Road on a single roll of teletype if he was trying to get his character to level 80? I'm almost certain he wouldn't have.

It's clear to me what's happening here: the majority of perfectly good obsessive compulsive potential writers are instead turning their attention to WoW. What does this leave us with? A generation of writers made up of people who enjoy social media, who form a community that learns and grows together instead of wallowing in self-destructive behavior like alcoholism and drug use? No one wants that! This game must be stopped.

Middle School English Teacher Uses iPhones as Teaching Tools

There's an episode of Boy Meets World in which 'cool' English teacher Mr. Turner assigns hapless Cory Matthews to read an issue of X-Men along with The Odyssey. [I seem to be on a sitcom kick this week.] Besides establishing Mr. Turner as the kid-savvy anti-Feeny, the episode was a demonstration that learning can respect both long-honored traditions and new trends.

Well, it turns out that a North Carolinian schoolteacher is trying the same tack, updated for the 21st century.

Growing Pains

Before you ask: no, this is not a post about the late-80s/early-90s sitcom starring Alan Thicke and Kirk Cameron. Wouldn't it be great if it was?

Instead, we're going to be making a few changes around here in the next month or so, and I wanted to share some of the plans with you as well as make a few requests.

Participating in NaNoWriMo? Has Scrivener Got a Deal for You!

This a quick post for those of you who will be participating in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo to those in the know. We're planning a more in-depth look at the month-long marathon to a 50,000 word novel when the 'competition' begins in November, but suffice to say NaNoWriMo has gained in popularity over the last ten years.

According to Macworld, an innovative piece of Mac writing software called Scrivener seeks to capitalize the scores of people who will be spending untold hours typing away at their computers this November.

Funeral 2.0: Baltimore Tells Poe to Never Say 'Nevermore'

Few figures in American literature have inspired such a loyal following as Edgar Allen Poe. The pioneer of short stories, mysteries, and Gothic horror has carved out a firm place in American storytelling and a rabidly loyal fan base.

This year, on the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth, Baltimore has planned a year-long celebration of Poe's life. But the event that is capturing the most attention is coming up this weekend and has nothing to do with life at all.

Want to Write Genre Fiction? Wondermark Can Help

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I lost the original post I wrote for today. I don't have time to redo the whole thing, so instead I have a peace offering. Check out this great 'Genre Fiction Generator' from the webcomic Wondermark, after the jump:

Why Would Anyone Pay for a Dictionary?

All of us at Paradise Tossed love words. It's something of an obsession for us, and being writers and poets it comes with the territory. We're always on the hunt for very new words, very old words and everything in between.

Like never before, words and their definitions are incredibly easy to access through any number of free, exhaustive sources. So why would anyone, anywhere pay for an online dictionary?

LeVar Burton and the Poetry of Innovation

Some days I try to write a reflection for this blog, and someone else says it better than I ever could. Today, that person happens to be none other than television personality and reading enthusiast LeVar Burton. The host of Reading Rainbow for many years and one of the stars of the popular Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton is uniquely placed to discuss the similarities between literary and scientific creativity.

A Room of One's Own: WriteRoom Makes Writing Distraction-Free

For all writers, and poets in particular, composition is as much an act of concentration as it is one of creativity. Many poets often talk about needing "time to write," but what most of them mean is "time alone." Poetry is both reflexive and reflective: solitude and concentration are usually just as important, if not more important, than the creative spark.

It's for this reason that most poets I know prefer hand-writing their work in a notebook [usually a Moleskine] to typing it into a word processor. One of the main reasons for writing this way, beyond the tactile pleasure of it, is the effortless concentration it provides. In a notebook, it is you and the page. If you've managed to find a solitary spot, there's nothing to get between you and your writing.

On today's computers, there's really nothing analogous to a blank page. Our operating systems are filled with dings, whistles, and flashing notifications; our browsers are almost always open, luring us to look at what the world is saying; and our word processors are bloated with so-called features.

"Give Me Simple Laboring Folk": Poems About and For Workers

Happy Labor Day, one and all! My forefathers and countless others spent most of each day in places like the one pictured so that I could study something as esoteric as poetry. As a way of honoring their contributions, I'd like to share some poetry written about and for the industrial labor force that built the world on which we now rely.

The quote in this article's title comes from a poem by Thoreau, entitled Conscience. It's part of a short list of "Poems about Work" compiled by PoetSeers.org that includes a number of traditional poems that are worth checking out. Along the same lines, it's worth taking a look at Philip Levine's reflection on poems of work.

For a less canonical approach, there's a great collection of poems celebrating workers by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer entitled Steady Hands: Poems about Work. It draws inspiration from Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" while still maintaining a highly original voice and tone.

I'm most excited about a multimedia poetry project entitled The Peter Principle. This online collection of lyric poems by Jeff Lytle is based on the actual Peter Principle, which states roughly that eventually everyone will wind up doing a job they aren't qualified for.

Most of the poems are written "before or shortly after going to work," as Lytle says, but the project goes beyond exploring work as a theme. By using links and intertextuality to tie his poems to one another in a non-sequential way, Lytle takes to task the notion of a continuous narrative in his work or anyone else's. By providing visualizations and an audio clip of what I assume is the author himself reading the work, he uses all of the Internet's richness to his thematic advantage. You can find Lytle discussing his presentation methods in more depth here.

The site updates once a week with new work poems, and it's worth returning to even as just a reminder of what can be done with poetry in the contemporary technological landscape. That being said, Lytle's exacting verse, as well as the writing of the other poets mentioned in this post, is a meaningful send-up of what is admirable about the legions of people out there who work for a living.

Resistance is Futile: More Computer-Generated "Robot" Poetry

Since this blog focuses on what happens when poetry and technology collide, we keep coming back to poetry written by computers. Today we want to quickly point out some additional resources to a tool we've covered before, the Google Poetry Robot.

The "robot," which adds words taken from Google's indexed web pages to user-inputed words, is a simple tool that can help to break writer's block now and then. But Geoff Peters, the tool's creator, has expanded on the project with two websites that add value to his program.

The first of these is RobotPoetry.com, a sort of one-stop shop for all things related to the Google Poetry Robot. The most interesting part of this site is the poems that are actually read by computer-generated voices. Peters gives this great explanation of the project:

Of course, with the power of modern text-to-speech technology, it's pretty easy to get a computer to read a poem. But interestingly enough, each robot "voice" seems to take on a character and personality of its own, and it is sometimes pretty hard to shake the feeling that the robot might actually mean something.

This creeping feeling that computers themselves may be able to create, or simulate, what we humans call "meaning" is what makes this project so captivating. If you're used to poetry analysis, it's pretty natural to begin interpreting the poems and the readings as if they were written by an actual person.

And it could be argued that they actually are, since the robot needs human assistance, including at least some human word input, to make the poems. That leads us to another branch of the project: the Robot Poetry Blog. Anyone can submit their own robot poems as posts to the blog, and it boasts an impressive collection of work, reaching back to September of 2005.

Unfortunately, there have been no new submissions since April. If this kind of human-robot writing partnership piques your interest, then I suggest you get to work. After all, resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Lazyfeed: A Great Tool for Poetry and Everything Else

There are thousands of poetry blogs on the Internet, and more are created every day. All around the world, people are self-publishing their creative work in what has become a revolution in the world of poetry publishing. It's impossible to keep up with all the new poetry that's put online each day. Traditional tools, like subscribing to every blog via RSS, can create an overwhelming barrage of reading material, more than a single person can get through. And even if you do subscribe to a lot of poetry blogs, how do you find new ones? Some poets are kind enough to post their work on Twitter, but this doesn't work well for longer poems and still has the same problem of discovery.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a tool where new articles from poetry blogs would come to you with minimal effort, and all in real time? Enter Lazyfeed: a relatively new tool in the world of real-time blog searching. The concept is relatively simple. Lazyfeed allows you to search the internet by tags on blog posts. It brings up the most recent posts that have the tag you're looking for. There's been a considerable amount of buzz about this service over the past couple weeks, most of it stemming from the enthusiasm of tech blogger Louis Gray. Here's a screencast from the site's creator that provides a more in-depth summary of the service:



Obviously, Lazyfeed is useful for any number of topics, but it's a great way to solve this aforementioned problem of finding and reading a large number of poetry blogs. By simply adding "poetry" as on of your saved tags, you can use Lazyfeed to retrieve all of the new posts written on the topic. From there it's very simple to share your finds on Twitter or Facebook, and to add your new favorite poetry blogs to an RSS reader. If you're looking to explore the ever-expanding world of poetry blogs, then Lazyfeed is definitely a tool for you.

Haiku from Space!: Great Sources for SciFaiku

It's no secret that I'm very interested in the development of haiku as a genre. So it came as a surprise when I discovered, thanks to folks over at Self-Published Sci Fi, a whole branch of the genre that I'd never heard of before.

SciFaiku, a portmanteau word for Science Fiction haiku, is a genre that has its origins in a document known as The SciFaiku Manifesto, published in 1995 by Tom Brinck. The manifesto outlines that SciFaiku should adhere to the tradition rules of the Japanese poems, with one notable exception: their theme should be expanded from the natural world to the speculative and exciting world of Science Fiction.

At first, Sci-Fi and haiku may seem like a bit of an odd couple, but in practice it's a match made in heaven. The same sense of wonder that attends a great haiku exists in good science fiction. Here's a good example straight out of the manifesto:

Asteroids collide
without a sound...
We maneuver between fragments.

Since SciFaiku and the internet developed at roughly the same time, many of the best sources for this kind of poetry can be found online. Brinck's own website remains one of the best places to get examples of the genre as well as a more in-depth understanding of it. At the University of Michigan, Dan Horn has compiled an impressive database of SciFaiku reviews. Teri Santitoro and J. Alan Erwine over at Sam's Dot Publishing put out an amazing print and online magazine called SciFaikuest which covers the best new poems in the form, as well as similarly-themed tanka and haibun. And as always, Wikipedia provides a nice round-up of other sources for Scifaiku.

As someone completely new to this genre, I'm already becoming immersed in the available online material about SciFaiku. Hopefully, you too will allow this genre to open you up to new possibilities for haiku, and for poetry in general.