Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Cryptic Poems Footnote

One of the authors whose work I posted got in touch with me! How cool is that? Look at the internet working the way it's supposed to for once, bringing people together with common interests! I was pretty excited about that, and I can't wait to tell my class.

For the record, the poems I posted were some of the ones I liked quite a lot. My initial reaction was, "Oh, why are they searching so basically? Why are their research skills so unrefined?" I resolved to work on our being savvier surfer-researchers at some point soon...

But then...

The poems they found, however haphazardly, were all pretty decent poems. Some were, in fact, excellent.

The lesson I learn in all of this? There is a world of online poetry out there that is vibrant, huge, and (like most things on the internet) filled with wide-ranging qualities of work. However, it exists "outside of the academy," which is a rather exciting poetic development.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

p.s. I told them. Now they know I have a blog (gulp).

Ellen Campbell said...

I often wonder how large is the online text we read..this is a cool story. And the fact your students know you blog is cool too. I told my students, but sincerely doubt anyone ever looked it up. But do we really know who reads what we write and send out there?