Elizabeth Alexander, poet

Elizabeth Alexander has been asked to recite an original poem she’s written for the U.S. Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2009. I’m about half way through one of my own making, which is difficult for me because writing an occasional poem is always too intentional a construction. If I finish the other half of it, I’ll post it.

Here’s a poem about poetry she’s written; she read it tonight on PBS’s News Hour, and I copied it here from her website.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Creativity in common

James Boyle is a hero of mine! His newest book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind has gained the attention and praise of all those in the free culture movement. Here’s a sample:

“Boyle is one of the world’’s major thinkers on the centrality of the public domain to the production of knowledge and culture. He offers a comprehensive and biting critique of where our copyright and patent policy has gone, and prescriptions for how we can begin to rebalance our law and practice. It is the first book I would give to anyone who wants to understand the causes, consequences, and solutions in the debates over copyrights, patents, and the public domain of the past decade and a half.” -Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School

This YouTube video speaks to the matter of the Creative Commons, which Boyle champions:

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

A new posting at the TED Blog announces Sir Ken Robinson’s new book titled The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything and provides a link to a video of his TED presentation on creativity in 2006. I continue to listen to what has been Robinson’s clear voice on creativity and human being. Awakening students’ passions of mind and heart in learning is as revolutionary and fundamental an aim as I can imagine for constructing an educational agenda.

“evolutionary aesthetics”?

I just ordered Denis Dutton’s new book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. I read about it at my mind on books, a great blog to which I’ve been paying attention for a number of months due to my interest in cognitive science, complexity, and twenty-first century challenges to human sustainability.