Starting Today: poems for the first 100 days of the Obama administration

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America."
President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009

Just another example of the interesting things people are doing using blogs -

Every day for the next 100 days, STARTING TODAY will post a new poem by a contemporary American poet, and the poems will be written for, and during, the first 100 days of the new Obama administration.

Day one's poem was Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" that she read at the inauguration.

The two blog creators are Maine poet, Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker from New York. The two also co-edited Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections
.

Teachers Blogging - A Call for Proposals

The New Jersey College English Association (NJCEA) is soliciting panels and papers on literary and composition topics for its Annual Conference on March 21, 2009 at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

I'm putting together a panel on blogging and would love to connect with some English teachers who use blogging as a teaching tool. I'd like to have papers on students as bloggers, teachers blogging for their students, teachers blogging as educators and the pedagogy of using blogs as readings and as writing platforms. I realize that Poets Online (this blog and the main site) has many teachers reading and using it, and that many of you are far away from New Jersey, USA. Still, perhaps there are a few of you that are blogging and would like to present a paper at the conference.

There are also panels planned on poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and other topics. You can contact me or any panel's convener via the email addresses on the site.

Full and part-time college instructors, graduate students, and other professionals within the field of English are invited to send panel proposals and 250-word paper abstracts on any topic related to college English. Email submissions should include your name, e-mail address, affiliation, and mailing address.

NJCEA brings together those interested in language, literature, pedagogy, and other aspects of the teaching and study of literature and writing. Paper proposals are now being accepted for a variety of panels.

originally posted as Blogging in the English Classroom on Serendipity35

Share This

You may have noticed the ShareThis logo appearing at the bottom of my posts here. If you click on that, it allows you to share this post (and blog) with others via your accounts on Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg or many others, or your own blog or that old standby, email.

The folks at ShareThis were nice enough to notice that Poets Online users were clicking and sharing, and so hey featured this blog on their own blog this month on their Roll Call 7.9.08

We definitely appreciate all of you spreading the word about the blog and the Poets Online site with friends you think would enjoy our collected efforts.

Haiku For Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day.

The theme this year is the environment and anyone with a a blog can join in by posting something today related to the environment.

Maybe it's a local environmental issue, or the beach cleanup nearby, or a poem or story with an environmental theme. Podblogs, videoblogs, and photoblogs count too!

The purpose is to have a massive hit on public awareness by sharing as many ideas in as many ways as possible.

Check out the Blog Action Day blog and read more about how bloggers can change the world. You can register your blog and join the 15,000+ other blogs (with 12 million readers) that are already signed up.

I clicked over to the excellent Poetry Foundation web site for inspiration, and using their search tool found some haiku.

I enjoy haiku for many reasons, but I do particularly like the close-up focus they often take on something in nature.

A few haiku from "After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa" by Robert Hass

New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.


And two by Gary Snyder-

Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods

At the last turn in the path
“goodbye—”
—bending, bowing,
(moss and a bit of
wild
bird-)
down.


Both of those poets are ones that I particularly enjoy reading and having met them both and heard them read, I know that their sense of nature and its influence on their poetry is quite - organic. Is that the word I want? It is within them, not something they take on in the writing. It is part of their practice of poetry.

Still, my favorite haiku still come from the masters.

In this one by Bashō,

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

you might say, "Where is nature?" I would have trouble answering you, and yet I am fairly certain that within that longing for place that is prompted by the bird's call is some longing for something lost from nature. Am I imagining that?

In this poem by Issa,

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.

the branch, river and cricket represent three areas of the natural world. I hear that cricket's sound as joyful (singing) and yet I also feel it may be doomed in its river journey. Is it singing like those on the Titanic going down? I might even convince some (especially without the author or time period being identified) that this small poem is a plea for our natural world (cricket) which is being carried away while we sing a song of ignorance is bliss or the song of the sirens or a sad dirge.