What to do you get when you partner up a digital humanities projects librarian with an associate professor of computer science and engineering? Answer: Something good. At the University of Nebraska Elizabeth Lorang, research assistant professor and digital humanities projects librarian in the University Libraries has teamed with Leen-Kiat Soh, associate professor of the computer science and engineering, and a couple of students students to develop software to recognize poetry from digitized newspapers. “Millions of poems were published in newspapers. Looking at them will shift the way we understand poetry in the United States.” says Lorang. Similar to text-mining applications, where specific words and...
Five Book (and one record) Birthday Salute to Wallace Stevens
Harmonium (First Edition, first issue, signed). The poet's first collection, published when he was 44 years old, after almost a decade of appearances only in magazines. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room to his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends. -from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction Today is the birthday of Wallace Stevens. Literary critic Harold Bloom called Stevens "the best...
Take Poems Once a Day and call me in the morning: Deborah Alma – Emergency Poet
Meet Deborah Alma the Emergency Poet and mastermind of "the world’s first and only mobile poetic first aid service." Dressed in white coat and stethoscope, Emergency Poet travels the UK in her 1970’s ambulance, accompanied by Nurse Verse or The Poemedic. Her domain - literary and music festivals, libraries, schools, pubs, weddings and conferences… "anywhere where poetic help may be urgently required…" Emergency Poet offers consultations inside her ambulance and prescribes poems as cures. In the waiting room under an attached awning Nurse Verse dispenses poemcetamols and other poetic pills and treatments from the Cold Comfort Pharmacy. Perhaps the folks at Wave...
A New Fine Press Edition of “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman
“A holy book of the nation, along with the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence,” - poet laureate Robert Hass on Leaves of Grass To mark their one-hundredth publication the noted fine press publisher Arion Press has chosen the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Chosen in part as a tribute to the publisher's predecessors Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, whose masterpiece was their 1930 edition of the Whitman poem. “I thought Arion Press might do something with Whitman’s poetry that was different as to the text and yet pay tribute to the 1930 edition by using a similar format,...
A five book (one letter and one record) birthday salute to william carlos williams
Paterson. Published by New Directions, 1946-58. Williams's magnum opus. Today is the birthday of the influential American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). From the Poetry Foundation: William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create...