POETREE

“Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.”

    ― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
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What's the time? Depends on who you ask — and where you're standing. To someone on a planet 63 light years away, the year on Earth is 1951. To a fly, 'now' is quite literally longer. ("Research suggests perception of time is linked to size, explaining why insects find it easy to avoid being swatted.")

The rate of our metabolisms are linked to the span of our lives in ways we do not fully understand. Our cells oscillate with the earth passing around the sun, our clocks are calibrated to hyperfine transitions of atoms, and age like time proves relative over and over again.

This week, we explore perceptions of time through poetry. Please see the schedule below to orient yourself temporally:


Wednesday: alee_grrl: Playing with Time - Prompt and Response Game

Thursday: jjhunter: Poem: "around the day (circadian)"

Friday: kaberett: Time Heals All Wounds

Saturday: ysabetwordsmith, Time: A Weapon of Mass Destruction & Poem: "A One-Way Trip"

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Last edited 4/5/14 by jjhunter

The way we see the world is shaped in part by the way we see the world: it's easier to notice and remember what you have ready words (and ready stories) for. As language less welded to convention, language that innovates and rewords, language that unsettles at times as much as connects — poetry speaks to the heart of politics: who constitutes 'we'; what's worthy of notice; how should people and institutions relate to each other.

This week we communal we offer each other a feast of poets and poetry in dialogue with bodies politic.


Tuesday: jjhunter: Taxonomists 'R Us: Phylogeny of Political Metaphor

Wednesday: leek: Carolyn Forche

Thursday: raze: Politics, Poetry, and Pride: Langston Hughes & the Harlem Renaissance

Friday: anonymous_sibyl: Re-crafting Competing Narratives: Finding The Role of the Poet in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Saturday: kaberett: Powerful words: the personal is political

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Last edited 2/22/14 by jjhunter

"Of the nine books of lyrics that Sappho is said to have composed, one poem has survived complete. All the rest are fragments."

"Hellenistic poets called her 'the tenth Muse' or 'the mortal Muse'"

    - 'Introduction', If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Anne Carson.
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Our central text for this week comes to us from more than two thousand five hundred years in the past. Sappho's original poem would have been lyric in the oldest sense of the word: intended for singing or chanting with musical lyre accompaniment. That the words, if not the music, were transcribed and treasured is testament both to their power and to how highly Sappho was regarded by her contemporaries and later generations. Centuries after her death, the Library of Alexandria staff collected every surviving poem of hers into nine papyrus scroll books, and listed Sappho as one of the nine ancient Greek 'lyric poets' most worthy of close study. In other words, Sappho was regularly listed in the ancient 'top ten nine' in her chosen art - no easy feat for any poet working in that tradition, let alone a female one.

The Library of Alexandria burned. Julius Caesar set fire to it; Emperor Aurelian burnt the entire city quarter to the ground; its daughter library in the Serapeum was destroyed, possibly by Pope Theophilus; no one knows for sure if there was a library left to burn by the time commander Amr ibn Al-Asi came conquering. The wonder is not that there is only one whole poem of Sappho's left; the wonder is that there are any fragments left at all, and that we can still find meaning in them after such millennia.

This week, we will explore Fragment 16 primarily in translation, re-examining it in light of its cultural and historical contexts, reimagining it as set to music, remixing it into new poetry, and revisiting more generally how we make sense of gaps in our record & our understanding of the past.


Monday: rainjoy: Greek Conceptions of Beauty, and Other Notes on Translation

Tuesday: luzula: Sappho's 16th fragment set to music

Wednesday: poetree_admin: ['free space of imaginal adventure' in honor of missing matter]

Thursday: alexconall: advancing Sappho into the English-speaking modern day [remix poem]

Friday: kaberett: Ringing steel, or, resonance

Saturday: cirque: Small Miracles

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Last edited 9/21/13 by jjhunter

As part of our collaboration with this year's Pod Together challenge, this week POETREE is hosting a parallel two-week icebreaker focusing on helping people of all skill levels warm up their creative juices, get acquainted with the resources poetree has to offer, and get oriented re: the challenges and pleasures unique to creating poetry rather than prose for such a challenge.

We hope all of you, pod_together participants and the broader poetree community alike, have fun with what we have planned.

( This week's schedule behind the cut )
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Last edited 7/7/13 by jjhunter

alee_grrl

This week we are celebrating and exploring the poetry of Dr. Seuss. The son of German immigrants and brewmasters, Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1904. He developed a love of rhyme as a child, and credited his mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, with instilling this love. She had chanted little rhymes to soothe her children to sleep. He started using Seuss, the middle name he shared with his mother, as a pseudonym while attending Dartmouth College. After he graduated from Dartmouth, he briefly attended Oxford University, where he met his first wife, Helen Palmer. After returning from a tour of Europe, he pursued a career as a cartoonist.

Much of his early career was spent doing advertisements for Standard Oil Company. But as World War II approached, Seuss began doing political cartoons for PM, a liberal magazine. He also joined Frank Capra's Signal Corps, where he helped making training films. This is where he learned the art of animation. During this time he was commissioned by Viking Press to illustrate a selection of children's sayings, and while the book wasn't a huge success his illustrations were met with critical acclaim. This would lead to his first children's book, To Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street. He went on to write and illustrate 44 children's books before his death in 1991, and his works have continued to inspire children and adults. For more on his fascinating life, please see: "Dr. Seuss" Biography, and the Dr. Seuss wikipedia article.

This week we are going to be exploring and celebrating Seuss's poetry in a variety of ways, including a tongue twister-challenge, a new Climbing the Poet's Tree writing challenge, and some in depth exploration of individual poems. There are still open spots if you are interested in participating!

( This week's schedule )

Last edited 12/4/13 by jjhunter

As the new year opens, so too does poetree: our next multi-Hosted week will focus on the theme of "cycles".

Ideally we will have one post a day from Monday, December 31st to Saturday, January 5th featuring poetry or discussion of poetry that explores, explicates, and/or elaborates on something cyclic. Whether seasonal or historical, biological or behavioral, tangible or metaphorical, as long as there's a repeating pattern at work it's fair game to claim.

If you are interested in Hosting one of the days, please comment on this post with your planned subject to claim an open slot; particular days are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Groups of two or more people are welcome to collaborate on Hosting a day together.

( Details of available days behind the cut )

Last updated 1/2/2013 by jjhunter