Poem on the Range

An email from the Academy of American Poets reveals:

Take some poetic license and hit the road in 2010. During National Poetry Month, also known as April, the Academy of American Poets will launch a collaborative multimedia-mapping project—Poem on the Range.

The Academy is calling on bookworms, road-trippers, and literary wayfarers to help picture poetry in place by submitting footage of poetic landmarks, cities, dwellings, streets, roadside ephemera, and other places immortalized by iconic poems.

Share footage from a poetic pilgrimage, or go the extra mile by capturing the experience on video while you read the poem on location. Tag submissions with a short note on what the poem, place, or poet means to you, and upload geotagged content to the Academy's Poem on the Range group page on Flickr or the Academy's Facebook Page, add it to the "Poem on the Range" Google Map, or email your videos or photos to OntheRange@poets.org.

Entries received by April 21, 2010, will be considered for a special National Poetry Month feature on Poets.org, and top entries will be thanked with enough poetry goods to keep you well-versed for all those miles to go.

Need poems to roam by? Get started with a selection of poems about place by visiting www.poets.org/ontherange.

Rules of the Road (a.k.a. Guidelines):

1. Submit your videos or pictures (with a brief description) to Flickr, Facebook, Google Maps, or via email to OntheRange@poets.org by April 21, 2010.

2. Tag all content with the poet's name, poem title, and location (please do not submit content featuring your own poetry).

poetry by hand

By Hand: Lines for Mother's Day

"I didn't care about the gift. / It was the note I wanted, / the salt from his hand, / the words," admits a woman awaiting a Mother's Day package from her son away at war, in Frances Richey's poem "Letters."

There is no substitute for the intimacy of a handwritten note, no gift as singular as words carefully considered and chosen. Like a fingerprint, handwriting can identify its owner, even mood and intention can be revealed in the bends and crosses of letters, hidden in the slant of cursive.

This Mother's Day, choose meaningful lines from a poem, pick out a blank card, take a quiet moment and a smooth pen, and write with your heart in your hand. Find six lovely blank cards and a selection of lines about motherhood by E. E. Cummings, Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Robert Duncan, Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton, and many others, on Poets.org.

On the web at: www.poets.org/byhand

If one of the many selections does not suit you, feel free to compose your own!

For instructions on how to write your own sherku form of haiku, check here

introducing teens to poetry

To help spread the word:

Dear Friend: According to the results of a recent survey, over 75% of the people who use Poets.org share one characteristic: that they first developed an interest in poetry before their eighteenth birthday. With young people spending an average of 16.7 hours a week online, it is clear that in the long term, our best opportunity to reach new readers and writers of poetry is in their early years. That's the reason I'm writing to you today: to ask you to join me in a new Academy of American Poets campaign to dramatically expand our programs aimed at young users of Poets.org by taking fuller advantage of the technologies that the web makes available to us. Highlights of our initiative will include: • A new teen-specific area on Poets.org with resources specially designed for younger readers • Online chats between young readers and established poets • Free new videos featuring favorite poets reading and discussing their work • New and improved features at the mobile version of our website, Poets.org/m • Frequently updated content and resources in social networking platforms like Facebook and Myspace These are just a few of the aspects of our project—all aimed directly at young people who need to hear our message now more than at any other time. But in order to succeed, we need your help. These efforts will require funds for web programming and development, as well as bandwith and new software. During this back-to-school season, we raised $18,440 toward this project. We are now reaching out to Poets.org users like you to raise an additional $10,000 to reach our goal and move the project forward. With your help today, we can help start more people on the road toward appreciating poetry and, indeed, the lyricism of language and the magic and mystery of all the writing arts. If you could contribute $10, $25, or even $100 dollars to this project, it would help us tremendously. Plus, for a donation of $25 or more, we will send you a copy of How to Eat a Poem—an anthology of poems for middle-grade readers—for your favorite young lover of poetry. Donate today. Contributions in any amount will be greatly appreciated and will help us dramatically expand our online resources for teen readers. Sincerely, Tree Swenson Executive Director, Academy of American Poets P.S. Again, let me know if you would like to receive How to Eat a Poem as a token of our thanks. And please pass this email on to anyone who cares as passionately as you do about creating the next generation of poetry lovers.