This idea is for an online journal focused on Close Readings—Pick a poem, any poem, and go through it with a fine-toothed mental comb and share your understandings/observations/criticism. For an archetypal example of what the online journal would be looking for, please see Charles Alexander’s close reading of Elizabeth Bishop posted to the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics list in April of 2006 at http://tinyurl.com/w3elu.
The Clicker is a device that’s a little more complicated than the kind used for dog training, and a little simpler than the kind used by umpires to keep track of balls, strikes, and outs. But it makes a good, solid sound like the former and keeps track of numbers like the other. There should be two buttons on it, PLUS and MINUS. It should keep track of a grand total, a yearly total, and a daily total. It comes packaged with a sheet that gives “suggested” values for various events in life that can score points. Good Hair Day? Plus 5 points! Forgot to call you Mom on Mother’s day? Minus 50 points. And encourage users to make up their own scores for their own daily ups and downs. The goals are to be able to keep track of both the good thing and the bad things that happen to us (so we’re not so fixated on the negative all the time), and, to be able to answer the question, ‘How are you doing?” in an objective fashion. How am I doing? Well, I’m having a GREAT day (1180 points before noon!), but I’m still down for the year, though, overall, life IS good, see, it’s Life 1,543,790 and me 2,347,120.
This idea is for a T-Shirt that just has three words in large block letters that proclaim: Stop Marketing Me
This idea is for: A website where people can come to view and post their own responses to the fill-in-the-blank question: Poetry is _____. Site to be structured in such a way as to encourage contributions by limiting the amount of other responses that can be viewed in a session. Contribute a response and get to view some more. Don’t contribute and you’ll have to come back later in order to see any more. Users should register to read more than the first response they see, and register to contribute. Anonymous or named contributions allowed. It’d be great to have age information (including “none specified” for the squeamish) so that people could read responses grouped by age. Teachers at all levels could be encouraged to use it as a resource for teaching poetry, and for a place where their students could have their own “Poetry is ____” list poems published. Site could be seeded with statements about poetry from famous poets.
People Pointing Here