Recently I attended a webinar on poetry film. The term defies easy definition, but overall it involves the combination of a poetic text, either displayed or spoken, with images on screen. Usually such films are made as a collaboration between the poet and a filmmaker (English, 2013). The collaboration speaks to the social nature of information Read More…
Tag: National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month and information sharing
As I mentioned in the previous post, we cannot ignore the less formal ways in which we share information. In honor of National Poetry Month here’s some information about two poetry links. The first is a post from the Real Life at Home blog. The author shares poetry-themed projects to do with family members. This Read More…
World Book Night 2019: Poetry Chapbooks
How do we honor both National Poetry Month and World Book Night (April 23) in a single post? Let’s honor the poetry chapbook. The American Heritage Dictionary (2016) defines a chapbook as “a small book or pamphlet containing poems, ballads, stories, or religious tracts.” (Chapbook, 2016). Chapmen were the door-to-door peddlers who originally sold them (Chapmen, Read More…
Info Lit and Occasional Verse for Commencement
Information literacy places an individual’s information use in a larger social context (Association of College & Research Libraries, 2016, Introduction). Likewise, occasional verse sets one poet’s craft to a larger social purpose. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes this public function (Miner, Smith, & Brogan, 2012, para. 1). Several years ago I attempted a graduation Read More…
Poetry and the research conversation
My National Poetry Month posts are self-indulgent. This year’s is particularly so. Please bear with me, though, as I’ll make an information literacy point (or two). I’m preparing an essay for the Franco-American magazine Le FORUM. The piece recounts how a certain poem worked with surrounding items in Le F.A.R.O.G. Forum (Le FORUM‘s precursor). In Read More…
National Poetry Month and info lit
Image from freeimages.co.uk/ For National Poetry Month 2016 I salute an underrated device, the epigraph, “a motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme” (Epigraph, 2011). How do we attribute such a quote when performing a poem orally? Hamilton College (n.d.) offers tips on citing sources in oral Read More…
Poetry of the Natural Sciences
Image from freeimages.co.uk At first glance poetry and the natural sciences may seem far apart. As Padel (2011) notes, though, both poetry and science look at concrete particulars (¶ 7). Rillero (1999) describes the use of haiku in a biology class. Since haiku concern nature and use few words, they can encourage students to closely Read More…
Poetry of the Social Sciences
Image by Coffeepusher (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons I wanted this year’s National Poetry Month post to reach beyond the humanities. In the social sciences researchers have been using poetic techniques to interpret and represent their data. Woodley (2004) describes how poetic devices can aid in analyzing an interview transcript. Read More…
World Book Night 2014: Poetry/novel Pairings
Image by Fancibaer (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons To honor both World Book Night (Apr. 23) and National Poetry Month, I’ve paired some novels with poetry collections. I’ve linked to specific catalog records: any edition of these books will do, though. Novel: The sonnet lover, by Carol Goodman Poetry Collection: Sonnets and poems, by Read More…
The poetics of close reading
Image from http://www.freeimages.co.uk With National Poetry Month upon us I’m thinking of the different connections between poetry and information literacy. I’ll start with a powerful connection: close reading. Poetry–especially when read aloud–encourages close reading. Take the refrain ‘A terrible beauty is born’ from Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916.” Do we emphasize the word terrible or the Read More…