National Poetry Month 2013: Digital Poetry Archives with Diane Mayr

Librarians can be a writers' best friend. Are you doing research for your  next book? A librarian can help you refine your search and find the resources you need.

Just remember, librarians are now known as Media Specialists -- and for good reason. Helping patrons find books is just a fraction of their skill set. Media specialists assist people in how to find and consume information. And in 2013, information often equals technology.

Today, librarian(!) and Poetry Friday blogger Diane Mayr introduces us to Archive.Org, a great TechnoVerse resource for all things poetic.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

You may already know about the Internet Archive if you've done research for writing projects, but, you may not know about all the poetry you can find.

"Like what?" you might ask.

Like an audio of a class on writing poetry conducted by Allen Ginsberg back in 1984. It's the next best thing to being in a classroom.

Later in life, Ginsberg often played
musical instruments during readings.

Or, recordings of twenty-three different readers reading Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice." Why would you want to hear so many versions? Perhaps you have to read your work aloud--listening might give you insights into how you should perform.

You can get to know a writer like May Sarton through a video recorded interview with her.

Find a page of Sarton quotes at Rugu.Com.

Through its "Open Library," The Internet Archive provides many books of poetry, which are in the public domain. Some of the titles are not available through other sites such as Gutenberg.Org, so if you're looking for something that's out of print, make sure to try The Internet Archive.

Or, do a general search using keywords such as "children's poetry," and you may come across something like Schnick Schnack: Trifles for the Little-Ones, published in 1867. It is not to be missed! Its poems for kids are delightful, as well as cautionary, and are accompanied by full color illustrations. (I never realized such lush illustrations appeared in books back then.)

Old volumes of Poetry magazine, starting with volume one: 1912-1913, are also available.  The first volume included a short piece, "The Motive of the Magazine."  Here's part of it:

If you're not looking for anything in particular, I recommend doing a search on a contemporary poet like Billy Collins or Rita Dove.  Leave the drop-down box on "All Media Types," and click "GO!"  I guarantee you'll be kept busy for hours!  Have fun, and let us know what you find.

Thank you for guest blogging in the TechnoVerse today, Diane. I am already having fun with this amazing resource. I spotted a tab entitled "Wayback Machine" at Archive.Org. How enticing!

Diane was kind enough to contribute a Media Specialist tanka for today's post:

another cup

of coffee while
fingers fly
from link to link seeking 
cures for curiosity

By Diane Mayr

Posted with permission of the author.

Diane Mayr is a public librarian in New Hampshire.  She is also the author of several books. Last November, her picture book, Run, Turkey, Run! was turned into a children's musical theater production!  [see photo]  Diane is a big fan of haiku, haiga (illustrated haiku), and other short form poetry.  Visit her blog, www.randomnoodling.com, to learn more.

Tomorrow, a poet from  my neighborhood -- Kay Weeks of Howard County, Maryland -- tests out a random poetry generator. Want to try one now? How about Vogon poetry?

National Poetry Month 2013: Tools for Listening and Keeping Track

When I visit elementary schools, I always begin the residency with two questions for my students: "What do you already know about poetry?" and "Have you ever heard a poet read her own work?"

In response to the first question, children love to show off what they know -- poems can, but don't have to rhyme; there are poetic techniques like alliteration and imagery; poems can be about anything the poet chooses; they are a good outlet for self-expression.

However, my question about seeing or hearing poetry in performance usually only earns a few raised hands. For most elementary schoolers, a poem is text on a page, not a living art.

Today in the TechnoVerse, Poetry Friday blogger Amy Ludwig VanDerwater shares some multi-sensory tools that can enhance poetry on the page.

Amy book Forest Has a Song was just released!

SoundCloud and Pinterest: Listening & Keeping Track

by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

I usually write by hand on creamy journal paper, and our family does not own a television. I call for my husband–“Honey!”–when faced with a computer glitch. My children change my laptop wallpaper to strange scenes of cartoon penguins, and I do not know how to get the cat photos back.  So I’m a bit slow to many new possibilities in the TechnoVerse. Still, here are a couple of tech-y sites that have helped me.

SoundCloud

Poems weave sound with meaning, and most poets will tell you that they read their work aloud as a part of their revision process. I do this too, and for the first two years of my blog, The Poem Farm, I relied on my voice and also the voice of my children and husband to read back poems, so that I could hear “if they sounded right."

Last year, however, I thought that it would be interesting to add audio to my posts, so that children could hear the way I read my own poems. I like listening to the voices of poets, so why not add this feature to my own work? Video was not necessary; it’s the “book version” of a poem over the “movie version” here. My face need not distract. Not knowing what program or app to use, I played around a bit on my iPhone and found SoundCloud. It was free (I recorded 121 poems for free before needing to upgrade yesterday to a Pro Plan for $33.99.) And it was easy. Just a few button presses, and I can save and upload my readings of poems.

Many teachers have told me that they appreciate the addition of audio on my site; it helps children develop an ear for reading poems and for hearing line breaks read by someone else. I did not anticipate, however, that recording my poems would also help me revise. But it does. Many times, reading my “finished” poem aloud, I would record only to discover that something was off, even after many out-loud readings without SoundCloud.  Many times, I have gone back to the notebook to fix meters and rhythms, line breaks and rhyme. SoundCloud has become a final check for me. I recommend that teachers use this, or another similar site, to help children listen to their own voices and poems.

This is a simple site to use, and recording on my iPhone allows me to find a quiet place (usually on my bed) away from barking dogs and violas and giggling children. Uploading is quick, and it is easy to embed the HTML code into a blog. You can see and listen to my SoundCloud tracks here - https://soundcloud.com/tags/Amy%20Ludwig%20Vanderwater

Pinterest

For anyone unfamiliar with Pinterest, it is a series of online bulletin boards that you make yourself. Pinterest is one way to keep track of sites and posts, books and interviews that interest you, information that you want to keep somewhere safe. Online goodies that you wish to keep, but that you don’t want to print and keep. What you pin can be seen by the world, and what the world pins can be seen by you. It’s a big ol’ flea market of everyone sharing their favorite stuff–for free.

[Amy's "Poetry Crafts" board on Pinterest is here, and it includes this pinned poetry craft: 

http://nycpix.wordpress.com/tag/arts-and-crafts-union-sq/]

To sign up for Pinterest, you simply enter through a Facebook account, and from there on out, things are quite easy. It’s overwhelming at first to see the whole world of people’s favorite dresses and recipes, crafts and home décor ideas, but just like with Facebook, you may choose who to follow. You may even choose which bulletin boards (“boards”) of which people you would like to follow. So in this way, you have control over what you see. You do not have to be real friends, or even real Facebook friends with people on Pinterest. You follow by interest, and you pin what you like. Following someone on Pinterest does not mean that you will be Facebook friends. These are separate.

So, how do I use Pinterest with poetry? To save things. It’s my online notebook. I’m quite disorganized, and so when I see a site with promise or a post with an idea I’d like to save, I simply “Pin It” to a board that matches it. I’ve made the boards myself (everyone makes their own custom boards), so this takes no time at all. The “Pin It” button on my task bar makes saving a new site a one click job. Most of the sites I visit regularly are not on my boards as I have them in my heart, but I have plans to link to more and more both for myself and to give exposure to my friends’ and colleagues’ sites. Many people have found my blog through what I have pinned, and in this way my online community has widened.

While I have aspirations to improve my organization and categorization of my pins, right now, for poetry, I keep the following boards:

Poetry Teaching Ideas - http://pinterest.com/amylvanderwater/poetry-teaching-ideas/

Poetry Teaching Resources Online - http://pinterest.com/amylvanderwater/poetry-teaching-resources-online/ 

(I plan to combine these first two boards)

Poetry Crafts - http://pinterest.com/amylvanderwater/poetry-crafts/

Poem Farm Poems - http://pinterest.com/amylvanderwater/poem-farm-poems/

FOREST HAS A SONG - http://pinterest.com/amylvanderwater/forest-has-a-song/

There are limitless possibilities for pinboards around poetry. Off the top of my head, I am imagining boards around types or subjects of poetry (pin bibliographies), photos for writing-inspiration, writing contests/retreats, and on and on.

Neither of these sites–SoundCloud or Pinterest–take a lot of my time, but in small ways, each has helped me to learn more about poetry and to manage these new understandings too.

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is an author and teacher living on Heart Rock Farm (The Poem Farm) in Holland, NY. Her first poetry book, FOREST HAS A SONG, was published by Clarion/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Spring 2013) and her second book, READING TIME, will be published by WordSong/Boyds Mills Press (date TBA). Amy is also co-author with Lucy Calkins and Stephanie Parsons of the grade 2 book POETRY: BIG THOUGHTS IN SMALL PACKAGES (Heinemann, 2013). In addition to poetry, Amy has written local NPR commentaries as well as a column for EDIBLE BUFFALO, and she works in many school districts teaching about writing. Amy blogs at The Poem Farm and Sharing Our Notebooks, both sites for anyone who is interested in poetry and notebook-keeping.

Amy, I can't wait to try out SoundCloud. You  make it sound like a great and simple tool for revision. I have to admit, I've been avoiding Pinterest--worried that I will use it more for procrastination than productivity--but you've encouraged me to at least give it a try.

Tomorrow in the TechnoVerse, poet Ken Ronkowitz tells us about his longstanding poetry site, Poets Online.

National Poetry Month 2013: Poetic Form Goes Tech with the Text Sonnet

It's Friday -- the first Poetry Friday of National Poetry Month 2013. Here at Author Amok, we are spending April in the TechnoVerse, that place where poetry and technology intersect.

So far, we've had guest posts from poets Gloson Teh (comparing writing poetry to writing code), Linda Baie (poetry apps for inspiration) and Barbara Morrison (using the writing support program Scrivener for poetry).

It is my good luck to have a tech-savvy teen in the house. Sure, once in a while my sixteen-year-old son is a tech snob. (“Mom, you are NOT getting an iPhone. iPhones are for old people.”) His skills with a computer have come in handy on many occasions.

His skills as a texter make me a target for eye rolls. If I type text messages with my fingers instead of thumbs, I get, “Mom. That is not how you do it.” Then I try thumbs. And auto-correct steps in, with dubious results.

My son doesn't text much any more, but it's how my
13-year-old daughter  communicates with friends
when she's not at school.

Today in the TechnoVerse, poet and educator Scott Slaby combines texting and poetry with a sonnet text-happy teens will appreciate.

Thanks for today’s tour of the TechnoVerse, Scott. (Don’t know what the TechnoVerse is? Read about it here.)

As an educator, I love teachable moments – those times when students have opportunities to learn something about themselves, about the choices they make, about life, and, sometimes, about Art. It’s especially wonderful when teachable moments involve Poetry.

It’s not often, however, that such an opportunity brings together my life as a public high school English teacher and my life as a poet. I often find it difficult to write poems that speak about adolescents and that also appeal to their sensibilities. Such was my intent with the following “text snt,” which was included in the fourth edition of Lewis Putnam Turco’s The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and InventedForms:

“The text sonnet (a.k.a. ‘txt snt’) first appeared in the mid-2000s, when a group of desperate high school seniors sought answers to AP multiple choice practice questions by ‘texting’ messages from their phones to their friends who had completed the questions earlier that day. Their English teacher, Scot Slaby, caught them, gave them zeroes, reported their cheating, and created this ‘txt snt’ to demonstrate the relevance of poetry.”

opN b%k

U need 2 l%k 4 hidN clues ptN
dis hi skool test -- yr wrkz success
depends on l%king for key words witn
d txt 2 help u solve dese problems; gez
agn, ‘ntil u feel ur right @ lst.
U thnk u know d terms bt dey confuz
u. Wonder how yr bud-E evr passed
dis li’l test? U raise yr h&, xQs
yrslf, n hide out ina bthrm stall
2 txt yr (A+) pal. No service? Wlk
bac, 2nd gez yr choices. Woch d wall
n lisN 2 d tckng, tckng clock:
dnt giv^ -- failure wldbe déjà vu:
ll answers r right hre n frnt of u.

Copyright Scott Slaby. Posted with permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Since the poem’s composition, I’ve noticed that many students “text” much more quickly than they used to with their thumbs, minimizing their need for textspeak. Sure, there’s the occasional “r u dare?” (which provides its own poetic opportunities), but most of my students’ “texting” involves proper spelling with a lack of punctuation. On the few occasions I have shared this poem with students, some of them have said that, at first, they find it difficult to read (these are the same students who do their paper writing on their cell phones, thumbing through letters on touchscreen QWERTY keyboards at speeds that stun even the most accomplished typists). 

The QWERTY keyboard dates back to the firstpatented typewriter.

Such difficulty is understandable, but once students slow down and focus on the language, giving themselves over to the textspeak “rules,” they find the sonnet readable enough and can recognize the language at play. After all, these students are not “all thumbs” with language. They communicate very differently from a generation or two before, but they are still curious and inventive, and, in respect to language, they’re inspired by “what’s new or different.” Like any student, they need to be hooked by a poem.

This is where the text sonnet meets them and what they usually take away from reading it -- Poetry is possible with all aspects of language. If the text sonnet has done anything, it has empowered some students to take risks with language while learning its basic rules. Whether some of them find reading the text sonnet to be “cool” or “weird” isn’t what’s important to me; what’s important is that they’re engaged, interested, and talking about language and Poetry, even if it is via text messages with their “bud-E” sitting a few feet away from them.  

For more on textspeak and other odd and invented forms, see the fourth edition of Lewis Putnam Turco’s The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms from The University Press of New England.

Available at Amazon.

Scot Slaby earned his M.A. in Writing (Poetry) from The Johns Hopkins University, and he currently teaches in Frederick, Maryland. His poems have appeared in The Book of Forms, unsplendid 2.3, Verse Wisconsin and elsewhere. He can be reached on his blog, What's at Stake?, at http://www.wutsatstake.blogspot.com.

Thanks, Scott. My friend Michelle is still making fun of me for the single time I texted "2morrow" instead of "tomorrow." I'm glad to hear that newer smartphones are making text speak less popular.

Can't get enough of poetry? Read, Write, Howl! your next sonnet -- traditional or textspeak -- with Robin Hood Black. She's hosting the Poetry Friday round up today.

I'll be a little delayed replying to your comments, friends. We are celebrating Miss J's thirteenth birthday (belatedly) at the Harry Potter theme park :-)

National Poetry Month 2013: Organizing Your Poetry Manuscript with Scrivener

Twice a year, I sit on the living room floor, surrounded by print-outs of poems, short stories and essays. It's part of my  job at the editor of a literary magazine. Once our short list of selections for Little Patuxent Review are made, this is how I order--and reorder--each issue, until I'm happy with the journal's flow.

My intrepid helper, Sam, peruses the Winter 2013 issue of LPR.

Is there an easier way? Baltimore author B. Morrison says, "Yes!"

Scrivener: I'm a Believer

I confess I thought writer's software packages were just flashy toys. Having started my writing career using a typewriter, the ability to copy and paste still seemed like a luxury, and I couldn't imagine wanting more than word processing software. However, trying to restructure my WIP for n^th time, I kept getting lost in my large file. I needed a map. I needed to see the whole thing at a glance. I needed, as I was informed by several trusted writing friends, Scrivener.

Scrivener is writing software for Mac and Windows.

In Scrivener, the center of the screen is the Editor in which you type or past text just as in any word processing software. On the left you can elect to show the Binder, which is an outline view of your document. You can create folders within folders to reflect your desired structure and fill them with separate chunks of text. The chunks act as virtual index cards on the folder's cork board, which appears in the Editor when you click on a folder. Then you rearrange the chunks by dragging and dropping the index card on the cork board or the title in the Binder. When you click on a chunk, you see the text in the Editor.

Scrivener screen capture from Spellbound Scribes.

Scrivener automates my old process of laying out index cards on the carpet. I imported my existing file, separated each poem into its own chunk, and created a hierarchy of sections. Moving poems and whole sections around so easily made me positively giddy--I had to force myself to stop and export a portion of the manuscript to see how it looked when assembled.

Although you can construct your own project, Scrivener offers a poetry manuscript template. The customizable template sets up the front page and the header for the remaining pages. I decided to make each poem a separate chunk and created section folders in which to organize them. If you've ever put together a poetry collection, you know how much rearranging goes into getting just the right order. Scrivener makes it easy to move poems around, while the Binder gives you the map of the overall project.

Scrivener screen capture from OrganizingCreativity.Com

You can also elect to show the Inspector, which appears on the right side of the screen. The Inspector lets you make notes about each card and select options for the way that text is included in the compiled document. For example, in the Inspector I selected to have each chunk--each poem--start on a new page.

Compiling is how you create the finished document, and represents a whole other level of value. You can compile your manuscript as a Word document, Rich Text (rtf), PDF or a number of other formats. You can even compile it as HTML. Best of all, you can compile it as an ebook in multiple formats: ePub, Kindle, iBooks. Zing! Hit one button and there's your ebook!

I've only just begun to explore Scrivener's features, but I'm already a convert.

For contrast, Barbara is sharing a technology-free poem about writing.

The Poet

I find the world too

much sometimes.

Just give me

a table to write on

a little quiet

and a view of trees.

by Barbara Morrison

Posted with permission of the author

Barbara Morrison, who writes under the name B. Morrison, is the author of two poetry collections, Terrarium (2013) and Here at Least (2006), and a memoir, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother.  Her award-winning work has been published in anthologies and magazines. She conducts writing workshops and speaks on women's and poverty-related issues. She is also the owner of a small press and speaks about publishing and marketing. She has maintained her Monday Morning Books blog since 2006 and tweets regularly about poetry @bmorrison9. For more information, visit her website and blog at www.bmorrison.com.

Available at Amazon.

Thanks, Barbara. You've made a believer out of me, too. I'm going to give Scrivener a try for Little Patuxent Review, but also for my own writing. Looks like Sam is out of a job.

National Poetry Month 2013: Code Is Poetry

Code: a poetry frontier. These are the voyages of teen poet Gloson Teh. His mission: to explore strange new comparisons between poetry and computer code, to see out new forms and new ways of writing, to boldly go where no young poet has gone before.

Gloson Teh is a 15-year-old poet. He has been writing poetry since he was 9 and blogging since he was 10. You can find his poems and books at www.poetrytalents.com. (He has blogged tech at www.glosonblog.com, which is on e a break.) He also does school poetry visits to flabbergast kids with his poems.

Welcome Gloson Teh to Author Amok!

7 Things Poetry and Code Have in Common

In early March, I spent hours coding my poetry website, because I realized that my previous theme was buggy, and that the design wasn’t as user-friendly as I thought. So, I did a makeover. Now the site feels so much better!

While coding and trying out different WordPress plugins, I ended many times on WordPress.org, but it wasn’t until later that I saw this in the footer:

I stopped there for a while.

WordPress.org thinks code is poetry? How long has THAT been there? I hadn’t noticed it before.

Hey, you would pause too if you were using WordPress to code a poetry site!

So I was prompted to think…what do poetry and code have in common?—and thought of 7 things.

1. They paint pictures

Poetry is a frequent user of vivid imagery. If you don’t know what vivid imagery is, it’s when you look at some words that make you can’t help thinking of pictures that seem very real and vivid.

So, just like poetry tells your mind what to display, code tells the browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc) what to display.

A poem As I stared into the sky, I saw a cloud, a cloud sort of grey, yet edges shone gold, and a twist at the end, with a hint of mist. Cloud, sunset. Surreal.

A piece of code font: bold 70px Garamond, Tahoma; color: #C4C4C4; padding: 25px 63px; background-color: #1449B9; margin: 0px; border-radius: 25px; border: 4px outset #FFF367; text-shadow: #D5D5D5 0px 0px 0px, #E0E0E0 -1px -1px 0px, #F0DC90 -2px -2px 0px, #FFEA49 -3px -3px 0px, #FFEB4A -4px -4px 0px, #FFF296 -5px -5px 0px, white 0px -6px 60px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) -7px -7px 6px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.498039) -7px -7px 1px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 0px 6px; display: inline-block; “> CSS

What it paints:

What it paints:

Okay, okay. Bad attempt at “painting” using CSS code. I’ll do better next time. 

As you can see, both of them paint pictures—one for the mind, and one for the web browser—just like a paintbrush! Either way, each product they paint can be painted well, or painted lousily.

2. Line breaks make them beautiful

It’s a striking resemblance.

Code and poetry use line breaks all the time. See the examples below:

Free verse poem (source): Thrill Ride. Up. Up. Click, click. Wind blows sharp in my ears. My heart jumps. Skips. It’s up. It’s up higher. It’s up, up the highest. Hands grasp at the clouds. Then a forever pause. Still. Waiting. Finally. Whoosh! Steep drop down, down, down.

Code: function ptw_the_content($content) { global $post, $ptw_post_id; if (is_single() || is_page()) { $ptw_post_id = $post->ID; } return $content; }

In poetry, this principle applies more powerfully to free-verse poems than to poems with fixed rhyme & meter. Why? Because line breaks control the flow.

In the case of code, if you give a coder a huge block of code without ANY line breaks…

…he would faint on-the-spot! 

Poetry, without line breaks, although readable, loses its form and art.

Code, without line breaks, although functional, loses its ease & becomes a scary block. (Mwahaha)

3. The process of writing them is similar

According to Kenn Nesbitt, from whom I’ve learned a lot during my early poet days, a poet is like a sculptor:

“If you watch a sculptor carve a statue from a block of stone or wood, you will see that they first carve out the rough form. Next, they come back and carve the detail. Finally, they come back and polish it.”

I read this when I was 9, and I can still remember it because it’s an awesome analogy.

And I thought, THAT’s another thing poetry and code have in common—both are like sculpting!

Sculpting	Writing Poems	Coding
1. Carve the rough form.	1. Get ideas from brainstorming or being inspired.	1. Create the rough template from your idea.
2. Carve the detail.	2. Write down the poem.	2. Code the code!
3. Polish it.	3. Proofread, revise, and improve.	3. Improve, add new features, and fix bugs.

On a side note, did you know that Dr. Seuss liked to “polish” poems a lot? I heard he proofread and revised them (usually for a year) until they were perfect before publishing them.

4. They take skill to write

I believe that if you’re passionate about something, you’ll become skillful at it really fast. Code and poetry take skill to write.

In poetry, you select the right words to convey the right feelings. You use an appropriate rhyme scheme and meter for the purpose of impacting the reader. You avoid using adverbs unnecessarily.

(‘Unnecessarily’ is an adverb. Oops!)

In code, it gets more technical: You want to select the right type of code (e.g. PHP, CSS) to fulfill the right purpose. Like unnecessary adverbs, you make sure there are NO UNECESSARY bits. If you use extraspaces, apostrophes, or quotation marks, code’s gonna get ugly buggly.

5. They might seem terrifying at first, but once you learn them, you may like them a lot

Ask any average person if they like poetry, and they’d probably be like, “Poetry! Aaahh [flees].” At least that’s the case with my previous school. Some of my schoolmates were terrified by poetry because it was too hard to decode.

So a teacher who knew I did poetry asked me to share the fun of poetry with her class.

So I did (photo on the right).

I introduced poetry as a fun art. I even shared with them a poetic recitation of the pop song “Sexy And I Know It” to show them that poetry is more than “boring” Shakespeare poems.

Similarly, most people are terrified by coding, because they don’t understand it, because they are not taught to (sadly). Once you learn code or poetry, you might have just discovered a new passion!

I learned coding when I was 10 years old because I felt that the font size on my tech blog (that I started as a hobby) was too small. I adventured into the WordPress theme editor and landed on the CSS code. Because CSS was easy to understand, I discovered that altering “body {font-size: 10px}” to “14px” makes the text bigger. Yay! I did a little victory dance in my head.

I began to understand code because I broke out of my comfort zone (user-friendly settings) to edit CSS codes.

That’s how I started coding. Now, I am familiar with the “genre” of HTML and CSS, but I have not yet learned PHP. So instead of writing PHP, I carefully copy-paste it. If I wasn’t careful, KABOOM!!—That’sPHP.

*sigh* I wish my school taught PHP, which leads me to my next point…

6. They need to be taught in schools

Poetry and code are both vital subjects in today’s world.

Poetry is a art of the words that creates inspiration, joy, and fun!
Code is also an art of sculpting tech functions to make life easier.

Schools need to teach both of these to empower students to excel:

Check out this video by Code.org, titled “What most schools don’t teach”, which encourages schools to teach Code as a subject.

Poetry and code equip people to CREATE!

…which, again, leads me to my next point. 

7. They allow you to CREATE amazing stuff!

Poetry lets you to create the most wonderful of stories. Take a look at Dr Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Their stories are so amazing they make you think about how amazing they are! Hahah.

Also, one of the reasons poetry is so amazing and creative (in my opinion) is because it can rhyme. Rhyming is pleasing to the ears, and so is meter. Creating a poem that utilizes rhyme and meter in the best way takes skill and art.

The word choice is also important, to make the readers feel the feeling they are intended to feel!

Coding, well, it allows you to create the most wonderful of technology! Take a look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. They are responsible for the fact that I can write this blog post and you can read it (unless you’re using a Mac!), and consecutively share it with my friends with several clicks.

As the Dropbox creator, Drew Houston, said in the video above,

To be able to actually come up with an idea and then see it in your hands and then be able to press a button and have it be in millions of people hands, I mean, I think we’re the first generation in the world that’s really ever had that kind of experience. It’s, it’s the closest thing we have to a super power.

In the video, Mark Zuckerberg also added:

Just to think that you can start something in your college dorm room and you can have a set of people who haven’t built a big company before come together and build something that a billion people use as part of their daily lives… It’s crazy to think about, right? It’s really, it’s humbling and it’s amazing.

As you can see from what these two coders said, coding can have phenomenal results. So does poetry.

Try out coding for yourself!

I hope this blog post has inspired some poets to try coding. If you have a website and access to the theme CSS code (most sites/blogs have it), you can start by editing the body font size! The code would look like this:

body {
margin:0;
color:#000;
font:13px tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
}

Change “13px” to whatever size you’re comfortable with. And if it works, do a little victory dance!

(The code above is sort of poetic too, don’t you agree?)

Conclusion

So, the conclusion is, code is a sort of poetry, and poetry is a sort of code. I think so, do you?

I don’t know, but come to think of it, code is applied poetry. Just like technology is applied science, code is applied poetry.

Boy, maybe code is poetry in action! Poetry that does action! Maybe!

To find out more about coding, you can visit w3schools or Code.org.

Did I miss any of the things poetry and code have in common? Do you agree or disagree with this blog post? Write your comment below. Thanks for reading!

Photo credits: code on black, poem on paper, sculptor, school computer lab

I met Gloson Teh through the Poetry Friday blogging community and Ed DeCaria's March Madness Poetry Competition. His passion for poetry and nimble mind continue to impress me. Thanks, Gloson, for stopping by and sharing your insights into poetry and code!