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Poetry

Random bullets of the book project

The thing about writing a book (and it feels like “writing a book” now, even though the phase I’m in at the moment is revising an article that will eventually become a chapter) is that it leaves virtually no writing-brain left for blogging. Everything’s getting channeled into the larger project, even if it’s just 15 […]

Testing out a teaching idea: library instruction meets close reading

Hello, neglected blog! I’m still here, just preoccupied with other writing projects, so blogging has fallen rather by the wayside. I have plenty of updates to share about said writing projects, but I’ve been meaning to post this, so here goes. Last semester I was prepping for a library class when an idea popped into […]

Personal anthology: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of the side effects of working on the Potential Book Project has been that I’ve encountered a whole lot of Victorian and Romantic-era poetry that I would never have bothered to read if I were doing straight-up literary criticism. I’ve written before about how the project has challenged some of my own assumptions about […]

More fun with visualization: word clouds

I’ve been slowly and steadily adding to the Potential Book Project database that I wrote about in the previous post, and somewhat to my shock, I realized that I’ve now got entries for over 1500 individual poetry quotations from 24 commonplace books compiled between 1800 and 1900. (And I’m still nowhere near done; I’ve got many […]

Glory be to God for knitted things; or, Knitting with Gerard Manley Hopkins

I blame Lady Penelope for my latest oddball knitting obsession. Had she not dropped the word "inscape" into this recent post about stranded knitting, I might not have gone off on the train of thought that began with "Oh, Hopkins! I should reread those poems again" and quickly led into "Wouldn't 'Goldengrove Unleaving' be a […]

The past is a foreign country; they write poems differently there.

My Material Cultures paper is coming together at last, with a little over a month and a half to go before I present it. I suspect a lot of the points I’m making have been made at least once or twice before, but I’m working with a body of evidence that doesn’t seem to have […]

Personal anthology: Thomas Hardy

I've been learning some very basic music theory lately (thank you, Open Yale Courses — it's so much easier to be an autodidact in the age of podcasts and Creative Commons educational materials). And one of the first things I realized was that I wish I'd known more about musical meter during all the years […]

What is the sound of one melancholy wave withdrawing?

My new absolute favorite thing on the web is FreeSound, an archive of Creative Commons-licensed sound files uploaded by users, like an aural version of Flickr's Creative Commons pool. They're tagged with keywords, and some of them (to the delight of someone as map-obsessed as I am) are geotagged so that if you want to […]

Notes toward an ongoing project: poetry, space, and mapping

I’ve blogged previously about my map obsession, and about wanting to do something with poetry and spatial or geographic visualization. And since one of my plans for this summer is attending THATCamp 2009 (yay!), I’ve been thinking a lot about what kinds of projects these interests might lead to. What follows is some thinking-out-loud. As […]

The poem fragments in the back of your mind

Emily Lloyd at Poesy Galore has tagged me with an irresistible meme: "What are ten lines from poems that stick in your head when you are walking around your day? Or, if you stop a minute and think of some lines of poetry, what comes up? It’s fine if you distort the line as you […]