William Stobb

Local oral history project, "Hear, Here" expands to include poetry as part of the historic record of downtown La Crosse. For more information, check out: http://www.hearherelacrosse.org/poetry-contest/

http://www.conduit.org Proud of the new baby! Conduit 27: Digging Lazarus--Reboot, Resurrect, Reimagine . As always, a ton of great work. I love the interview, though, with environmental journalist, M. R. O'Connor, author of Resurrection Science: "While I was writing the book I found it hard to delineate excitement over de-extinction from excitement over life extension technologies. We have a tendency to see ourselves as outside of nature and not subject to its laws. As I mention in the book, Google started this company called Calico (California Life company), and while no one really knows what they're up to, it seems one of their goals is to 'solve' death."

http://eng.longquanzs.org/Annimation.htm A few years back, one of my colleagues hosted a group of monks from the Beijing Longquan Temple . They were traveling and speaking to try to build awareness of their principles, and they had been working on a documentary film that illustrated their alignment with the natural world. I loved the film, with its stop-action animated illustrations of environmental disorders and sometimes incorrect English-over-English subtitles. It felt very earnest and innocent, and it reached me at a time when I was feeling more or less disordered as a creature, as I often do--life often feels baffling to me, not in an inaccurate way--I mean, a quote-unquote accurate perception of life often feels like a perception of confusion, to me. Anyway, I'd had a moderate episode of freaking out that very afternoon about something I don't remember now, and I was very happy to attend the presentation and kind of  sink into  a message that was  calmly ...

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser invites you to join a project celebrating the art of poetry recitation. Those who participate will have their video recitations available on an interactive web page—and will help make Wisconsin the Poetry Recitation Capital of the U.S.! To celebrate poetry and “heart,” Blaeser invites the memorization and recitation of poems for this   special online project.  “Having poetry at our fingertips—or on our lips—as we go through our daily lives can enrich us in many ways,” says Blaeser. “Recitation was once a common art, one I’d like to help revive.   When we know poems ‘by heart,’ they inhabit us and we them in a particular way.   We internalize the images, the ideas, and the poem’s re-seeing of the world, we experience the felt rhythm of the language.   The poem becomes another part of the vocabulary with which we can encounter and process our experiences in the world. It becomes a tool of celebration a...