Poetry For the Networked Generation

Here's a bit from School library Journal about a new poetry resource:

"This week, the Academy of American Poets announced the launch of Poets.org a mobile poetry archive providing free access to a collection of more than 2,500 poems. For students in English courses, the site also provides such handy tools as biographies of poets and essays about their work. For secondary school educators, there's a curriculum section. Soon, poems posted on the site that are in the public domain will be available for downloading and printing."

So students can download poetry to their ipods or their cell phones and have poems avavilable on demand. The article further states:

"I have always believed that poetry has a necessary place in daily life," says Tree Swenson, the academy's executive director. "Now you can find poems while on the go, as easily as you can read the news, find a map, or check the weather report." Poems can be browsed on the site by author name, title, the "occasion" that the poem describes, the poetry form, or by keywords.

Ok so how do we tap into this with kids? An idea that come to mind is to have them create personal poetry play lists, share these lists on a blog or wiki and then reflect about why these poems were chosen for their personal list. This can be a lead-in to writing lessons on poetry for English classes that culminate in a 'poetry reading' event in the school library.

For more information, check out the Poem in Your Pocket section of Poets.org.

Image:http://www.freefoto.com/browse/?query=cell+phone