Third Period: Slam Poetry. Fourth Period: Health June 1, 2011: With aid from a NEA Grant, the Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter Public School now offers a class on slam poetry as part of their ongoing program "Exploring Big Questions: Inquiry and the Arts". A significant aspect of the course is bringing artists into the classroom, with the most recent invitee being slam poet Taylor Mali. The school's [...] by Harriet Staff

English Majors Still Don’t Make Much Money May 26, 2011: This Atlantic article by Derek Thompson, which cites research from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, doesn't uncover any new findings, but it does at least fulfill Shakespeare's life(death?)long dream of being mentioned in an article directly beneath a bar graph.  While it remains true that degrees in the [...] by Harriet Staff

The Victorians put the OMGLOLROFL in poetry May 10, 2011: Book Southern Africa points its readers to a video at Carte Blanche examining the similarities between English-language SMS-speak and experimental Victorian poetry. Both of these make use of what British Library curator Roger Walshe refers to as "emblematic poetry," where one writes in a combination of numbers and letters. This was so common in [...] by Harriet Staff

Have MFA programs done away with standards? May 4, 2011: At Poets.org, Joan Houlihan shares some of her results from aninformal survey of students in four different MFA programs. While there's an "upsurge of MFA poetry programs, and therefore of poets," poets' abilities to grab and maintain readers are declining, leaving a gulf between the amount of work produced and the audience for it. As Houlihan [...] by Harriet Staff

Henry Morro’s New Gig April 29, 2011: Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life, Confucius purportedly said. On a recent visit to Southern California, while discussing the major influences on her work, Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles (Fault), director of the Utah Symposium on Science and Literature, mentioned that her parents were scientists. [...] by Wanda Coleman

Writing “I remembers” with the Fourth Graders at Garfield Elementary School April 23, 2011: At Naropa, one of my colleagues is the sparkly-eyed Australian emigrée Lisa Birman.  Hope I got the accent on the right e.  The other day, facing an upcoming visit to my son's school in Loveland, Colorado, I called her for help.  Ronaldo Wilson, bibliomancy, and analogies to contemporary architectural theory I can do; ages nine to eleven, [...] by Bhanu Kapil

Libryrinths April 20, 2011: The library I frequented when I was a little girl still looks much like it did in the 1970s and 80s. I'd like to revisit it someday, browsing the children's stacks where I found and lost so many stories. I say lost because, though no one ever speaks of it (would it be unjust or disloyal to my favorite institution?), the books one borrows and [...] by Ange Mlinko

This poetry thing goes both ways, or many ways at once April 20, 2011: The poet a.rawlings has been connecting students up with the contemporary poets they are reading. High school students that is. Scott Griffin, founder of the lucrative Griffin Prize for Poetry has begun a program that encourages high school students to memorize poetry and perform it, vying for a new prize. Over on Lemon Hound, I have invited a [...] by Sina Queyras

“An Antidote to Loneliness” April 18, 2011: Anisa Onofre, co-editor of Aztlan Libre Press, has pointed me to this 1999 article on Norma Alarcón, upon the 20th anniversary of Third Woman Press. I am especially struck by this paragraph: Third Woman Press began originally as an antidote to loneliness, when Alarcón -- a specialist in feminist critical theory, cultural criticism, and [...] by Barbara Jane Reyes

The University as the Poet’s Community April 15, 2011: There is a tantalizing thought that has been eating at me for a while and I still am not sure I have worked it out fully yet. It started to get at me in the middle of my tribute of sorts to the community of African American staff folks at the University of South Carolina who helped to make me feel valued as a professor and as a necessary part of [...] by Kwame Dawes