Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Today's edition of Saturday Sharing encourages you not to give up on Reluctant Habits, highlights all-things-poetry at O, Miami in Florida, sends you to Musopen for music, tells you what you'll get with a click at the Smithsonian, shows you what First Book can do for children, and offers access to a U.S.-based poet's blog about Japan.

✦ At the site Reluctant Habits you're as likely find 3,000-word essays on books as "long-form conversations" with artists and writers. Currently featured is "The Modern Library Reading Challenge" in which Reluctant Habit's managing editor is determined to read the top 100 novels (according to the Modern Library of America), starting at number 100 and working backward, and to write at least 1,000 words per title read. So far, so good. How long will it take? Would you believe "several years"? Of note is The Bat Segundo Show, described as "a cultural and literary podcast that involves very thorough long-form interviews with contemporary authors and other assorted artists. Standard questions. . . are avoided, whenever possible." Tune in. T.C. Boyle is among those who have made recent appearances.

✦ The O, Miami poetry festival was launched this month with the goal of ensuring that every person in Miami-Dade County, Florida, "encounters" a poem in April, which is National Poetry Month. The festival includes traditional poetry readings and poetry-in-public-places projects, the first-ever Miami Poet Census, poetry lesson plans for schools, poem drops, creation of poetry tags, multi-lingual radio spots of poems, and displays of poems in public libraries, and will culminate with a four-day series of readings at New World Symphony Hall on Miami Beach. The festival is being documented — artist David Reinfurt is responsible for active digital documentation of daily events and projects — and the record will be housed at the University of Miami's Richter Library. The site is available in English and Spanish and has the backing of a number of sponsors, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Michael's Genuine Food and Drink kicked off festivities with a poem by Campbell McGrath, a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient: "Ode to the Mother Tongue". To see images of the work in the restaurant's main dining area, go here. The restaurant's blogpost about the work is here.

✦ Devoted to improving access and exposure to music, Musopen creates free and educational materials, including recordings, sheet music, and textbooks, all without copyright restrictions. Search the music offerings by composer, performer, instrument, period, or form; or look for sheet music by composer, instrument, period, or form. Check the music catalog for all the ways to obtain music from Musopen; included is a streaming random selection of music live via Musopen Radio. Musopen, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, operates out of Palo Alto, California.

Musopen on Twitter

Musopen Blog

✦ At click! photography changes everything, you'll find a collection of original essays, stories, and images that document the uses and effects of photography in our culture and lives. Organized by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, which is now part of the Smithsonian Archives, click! is divided into seven themed sections: Who We Are, What We Do, What We See, Where We Go, What We Want, and What We Remember. This extraordinary resource also includes an Image Index and a teachers' section with lesson plans. A video introduction to the site is on the main page.

✦ Washington, D.C.-based First Book provides new books and reading materials to children in need, and to date has distributed through existing networks of community programs, organizations, and schools more than 80 million free or low-cost books in thousands of locations. Committed to ending illiteracy, First Book, which has more than 90 publishing partners as well as corporate and nonprofit/government partners, also serves children of low-income families in Canada.

The Story of First Book from First Book on Vimeo.

First Book Marketplace

First Book National Book Bank

First Book on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Book Mark, First Book Blog

✦ Alan Botsford, editor of the bilingual journal Poetry Kanto, is based in Kamakura, Japan, and has created the blog freedom in harmony in which he provides witness to events in Japan since the earthquake. Botsford's Website is mamaist. You'll find there several examples of his poetry, an essay on Whitman, and other publications, including Botsford's 2010 Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore: Dialogues Essays Poems (Sage Hill Press). Botsford teaches at Kanto Gakuin University in Japan. (My thanks to Denise at New Pages for the heads up on Botsford's blog.)

✦ I'm delighted to note that yesterday, my poetry collection Neruda's Memoirs: Poems received a wonderful review by Peggy Rosenthal of ImageJournal.