Shaking up Poetry

Poetry Foundation iPhone appGive your iPhone a shake and explore the vagaries of love: its joys, passions, doubts, disappointments, insecurities, and finally the grief it too often brings. Or maybe when you have to spend just a little too much time home for the holidays, you’ll want to deliberately line up “boredom” and “family,” and read what comes up, both to kill time and to remind yourself that you are not the only one bored by your family.  You can combine subjects and emotions deliberately, or you can “spin” the wheels and see what comes up.  There are so many combinations to explore, it seems like you’ll never run out.
I’m talking about a new iPhone app from the Poetry Foundation called, quite simply, “Poetry”.  It makes exploring poetry fun. What I’ve been talking about above is a feature that lines up emotions and topics such as love, nature, family, work and play to give you a list of poems relevant to the combination. I am pamelaannschoolofdance.com order cialis online a School Nurse at a Middle School in a suburb of a large city. This is said to be the best medication for you. cialis purchase Some cosmetic corrections may be required after 6 months to one year, after bariatric surgery, in some patients to get better contouring of the body. best price vardenafil cialis generic order Fallopian tubes: leading from the ovaries to the womb. The poems are from different eras, but all are fairly short and accessible. And even if you don’t like poetry, I bet you are at least a little curious to read what well regarded, “serious” poets have to say about disappointment or blame and family or, even better, disappointment and love. That’s the stuff of standup comedy, not poetry, right?

If you are into poetry, you can search for poems by title, first line or poet, and if you enjoy one you’ve read, you can save it to a favorites folder or share it on Facebook, Twitter or by email. Its a cool app, either as a pass time or as a serious pedagogical tool for studying poetry. Couple this app with Natalie Merchant’s new album Leave Your Sleep, which is a set of poems set to music, and you have a set of tools that could be quite useful in the classroom to turn students toward poetry. It’s a delightful collection, but perhaps more on that in another post.