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.

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.

NaNoWriMo Takes the Block Out of Writers

It's that time of year again. Halloween has passed, and there's not much time left before we'll all be watching football and stuffing ourselves with turkey. But there's a time in between of which many who read this blog are aware. A time for something that can only be called 'literary abandon'.

Collaborative Poetry and the Storytelling Techniques of Neil Gaiman

Yesterday at noon, Neil Gaiman, celebrated author of The Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline, and more, sent out a single message from his Twitter account, @neilhimself. As io9 reported, what followed would be thousands of messages in reply to Gaiman's prompt. The first thousand are currently being compiled and edited into a massive collaborative short story.

Collaboration is a social media buzzword, and here at Paradise Tossed we've reported on a number of interesting collaborative writing projects. Gaiman is probably the biggest name writer to get in on the act, and on the occasion of this tech-savvy author's high profile project we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the whole idea of collaborative storytelling.

Castle in the Clouds: Read Write Poem Launches Social Network for Poets

Poets thrive in communities. Shakespeare had London's robust playwriting community; Fitzgerald had Hemingway and vice versa. Ginsberg had Kerouac and the other Beats. Even stodgy, gloomy Milton had Andrew Marvell. Though nothing can replace a close, personal friendship with someone who shares your craft, the internet provides us with many more opportunities to collaborate with fellow poets, and to create these kind of friendships.

Read Write Poem, a website that has been cultivating a community of poets for a quite a while, understands that interaction with other writers can be a poet's bread and butter. Since its inception, the site has been issuing weekly "challenges" that allow the community to work on similar projects at the same time. That alone made it a site worthy of recognition, but the Read Write Poem team wasn't content to stop there. This dedicated team, including Dana Guthrie Martin, Andre Tan, Dave Jarecki, Nathan Moore, and Deb Scott, has been working hard to turn Read Write Poem into a hotspot for poets on the web.

In a site redesign years in the making but just finalized two days ago, this relatively simple blog has become a full-fledged social network. With groups, forums, messages, and individual profile pages, Read Write Poem has overnight become a Facebook for poets, in the same way that the fairly popular Goodreads is a Facebook for readers. Already Read Write Poem is blossoming into a successful, active community. There are many available groups with discussions going on now. Since joining a couple days ago, I've found it to be a pretty welcoming atmosphere. If you're interesting in meeting and working with fellow poets, I highly recommend giving the site a try.

"But," you say, "I already have Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Goodreads! Do you really expect me to maintain another social network? All these other places have groups and resources for poetry lovers. Why do I need a specialized network?" Broad-based social networks are great for general discussions and finding people with shared interests. But a network with a specific focus can simply provide resources and in-depth conversation that a less-specialized community can't. Already the discussions on Read Write Poem delve deeper into poetics than any Facebook group I can think of.

Even if you feel overwhelmed by the social web, you'll find this site to be a good break from the madness, rather than an additional burden. Who knows, you may even find the Kerouac to your Ginsberg. And as poets, can we really afford to work alone?


[Also, feel free to seek me out on Read Write Poem here.]

The Wednesday Five

In case you haven’t seen it already, Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy has written a hilarious poem in rhyming couplets called “The ABCs of Skepticism”. Jonathan Swift, eat your heart out!

In this week’s Five, I wanted to focus on poetry tools instead of poetry databases. The sites I’ve listed are excellent resources for helping writers, readers, and teachers to deal with complex poetic issues.

1. Wikisaurus

A little known off-shoot of the vast Wikipedia project, Wikisaurus is one of the best online thesauri out there. I’ve got nothing against Roget’s, but the interactive nature of a wiki fits the idea of a thesaurus perfectly. It’s like asking thousands of your closest friends, “What another word for…?”

2. Wordle

Wordle is a great site for creating “word clouds” out of your own text. This can be great for spicing up an otherwise serious topic. A friend of mine used a cloud from Wordle as a title page for her project on literary freedom in Iran. Also I think that it’s important for poets to never forget that although we deal in words, much of our art is visual in some ways. Plus, this tool is just plain fun to use! Here’s a really great anonymous one about Spring:

3. Poetry Forge
Above is a picture of a a great flash poetry tool for metaphor, but Poetry Forge is chock full of a variety of resources for both students and teachers. Run by the University of Virginia, this site is well-maintained and straightforward: perfect for when you start to feel bogged down by poetic challenges.

4. readwritethink

Not to be confused with last week’s excellent readwritepoem, this site is a fantastic reading and writing guide from the International Reading Association. Geared specifically toward education and making poetry work for teachers and students in and out of the classroom, this site is recommended especially for those of you who instruct poetry in some way.

5. twiHaiku

Alright, so I’ll admit that this site doesn’t fit with today’s theme, but it fit with last Monday’s post, and I can’t go another week without mentioning it. This pretty amazing project is part of the makeliterature.com network, a social website that offers itself up as a self-publishing medium. With your own makeliterature account, you can submit haiku to the twiHaiku site by simply typing it into the right box, just like tweeting yourself. Your haiku is then displayed on the@twiHaiku Twitter account. What this creates is a network of dedicated haiku poets who collaborate to provide the Twitter community with a steady stream of original poetry. If you can’t already tell, I’m simply brimming with excitement about this project, and watching it grow has been great fun!

And that’s it for today. I’d like to finish by asking a question to all the poetry teachers out there: what are your favorite resources for getting your students excited about poetry?

Of Travel, Lapses, and General Merriment

To start off I’d like to apologize for having taken such a long unexpected hiatus from blogging. Last Wednesday I left for Minneapolis to attend the Sigma Tau Delta Convention. In case you’ve never heard of it, Sigma Tau Delta is an honors society for English majors across the globe, but is mostly made up of American undergraduates. Anyway, I thought I was going to have more consistent access to the internet while I was there, and this wasn’t the case. So thanks to all who stopped by looking for articles and didn’t find them; I’ll resume my regular schedule after this post!

I don’t think of this as a space to share my personal experiences with you, but when they pertain to poetry I can’t help but fold it in. This conference is a gathering of students from all across the country, and in addition to scholarly papers they are permitted to submit and present original works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. I was accepted for an original fiction piece, and it was nice to be able to travel there and share some of my writing with the larger world.

Needless to say, I spent the better part of the week listening to a lot people read their work. I was instantly struck by how easily technology could have improved the experience. Sigma Tau Delta is generally a place for people on the brink, future literature scholars and creative writers who are just finishing their undergraduate degrees and represent the next wave of thinking and writing literature. The only whiff of technology I got the whole time was a rather unsuccessful proposal for a live-blogging program. There is no current evidence on the website that this blog even existed. If the literary world is to move into the 20th century, we must continue to embrace technology and the ways in which it can help us.

Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress are quick, easy ways to focus a large group of people on a single goal, but for some reason many at this particular conference seemed uneasy to try these approaches. I’m thinking mainly of the SXSW conference, where for the past three years Twitter has been responsible for main ebb and flow of events. Had they begun their blogging project sooner, we could have used the site as a way to familiarize ourselves with the pieces before the short readings. Questions to panelists could have been tweeted to a special account, making it possible to participate in several panels at once. And though I’m not a huge Facebook fan, a 2009 Conference group would have made it possible to meet people beforehand, and recognize them throughout the weekend. These are just a few of the ways that social networking can improve conference experiences. And in an area such as poetry, which thrives on collaboration, social experiences should be enhanced in any way possible.

Overall, the conference was wonderful. I discovered a beautiful new city, and I enjoyed the time spent with my fellow writers and thinkers, particularly the ones who I have gone to school with for years but never really gotten to know. I only think of all the other connections I could have made had more people there been willing to use the extraordinary tools that other groups of thinkers have already embraced.