Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Don't sweat July's heat. Find a cool place where you can enjoy five-minute poetry readings, a little silliness with the Arty Bollocks Generator, the latest TED talks, or a few quick peeks at an online Essay Library. 

✦ A weekly five-minute poetry reading program is featured at The Poets Weave on Indiana Public Media. Recent episodes have featured the prose poems of Gertrude Stein and readings with Sherman Alexie, Rachel Gray, Micah Ling, and Steve Scafidi. The program is hosted by poet Christopher Citro.

✦ We all know there's something for everyone on the Web, and some of us know just how much artists dread having to come up with an artist's statement. Put the one together with the other and you get the Arty Bollocks Generator. The generator, by the way, talks back. (My thanks to Boston.com and ArtInfo for this gem.)

✦ Art, science, and technology intersect at London Fieldworks, an umbrella organization for research and collaboration. A current and ongoing project in public gardens, Spontaneous City, dubbed the Super Kingdom project, has as one of its objectives raising awareness of the ecological and cultural value of urban green spaces. Also encouraging community engagement, the project is creating sculptural "habitats" (shelters, nests, feeders) for birds. The installations are assembled from custom bird and bug boxes reflecting local architecture. Images of the installations, which are found in Waterloo Park, Cow Tower, and Eaton Park, in Norwich, in England, may be viewed here. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival is a project sponsor.

Laura Snoad, "Secret garden", DesignWeek, July 13, 2010

✦ Take-out, with a difference: The Poetry Takeaway, billed as "the world's first purpose-built mobile poetry emporium", produces in under 10 minutes free, made-to-order poems. Learn more about how it works and see and hear in this video some of what the cart's top "poetry chefs" have cooked up. (My thanks to Nic Sebastian from whom I learned of this rolling soul-food dispenser.)

The Poetry Takeaway, London, United Kingdom

The Poetry Takeaway on Twitter

✦ Looking for essays? Register with Notting Hill Editions and then check out the NHE Essay Library, featuring 100-word summaries to a 100-essay collection, as well as an online journal with new essays monthly. NHE also publishes a range of books, including Roland Barthes Mourning Diary and George Perec's Thoughts of Sorts, which you may purchase directly.

✦ Dedicated to promoting access to poetry and literature, Poetry Flash, a nonprofit, publishes poems, reviews, interviews, essays, lists of literary events, and trade, submission, and award information for writers of poetry and fiction. It's a great resource.

✦ TED recently launched the TEDxTalks video site offering more than 7,000 curated and tagged videos (browse by topic, country, language, event). You'll find on the site a link to "Other Videos" where you may watch local TEDx trailers from around the world or browse listings for Webinars and workshops.