Wisconsin Poet Laureate "Poetry by Heart" Recitation Challenge
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 and of survival. Each poem we memorize adds t