Saturday, December 31, 2011

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Today's final edition of Saturday Sharing for 2011 offers an animation of a John Siddique poem and a video feature on choreographer Bill T. Jones, plus links to Eric Fischer's beautiful maps of Twitter's language communities, Wave Book's Erasures poetry project, the Library of Congress's wonderful new ViewShare platform, and two sites where you can pin poems to Google maps.

✭ My friend the poet John Siddique has now completed his animated series "year of full moons" with the release of "Yew Moon - We Are Russian Dolls to Ourselves", from his collection Recital, which I reviewed here. Enjoy!


Yew Moon from John Siddique on Vimeo.

See all the moon animations here.

✭ Eric Fischer has posted on Flickr his beautiful mappings of the language communities of Twitter; the map colors correspond to languages typed on Twitter. The Big Think posted a feature about the maps and what they tell us.

✭ Introduce yourself to the erasure process at Wave Books, an independent poetry press in Seattle, Washington. As conceived, the online project allows you to select a source text and, through a process of "disappearing" words or punctuation marks, create a new "sculpted text" or poem. You may save the program to the project archive, or print or e-mail it. Currently, there are more than 3,000 erasure poems available to view.


✭ The Library of Congress has launched a wonderful new site: ViewShare: Interfaces to Our Heritage, described as "a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets like a search box, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections." The site's facilities work with spreadsheets and other record types, allow you to import and upload your own collections, and also copy-paste and embed interfaces in any Web page. For an introduction to how ViewShare works, view the Screencast.

✭ Don't let your poems go unmapped. With Google maps in place, you can now pin poems to place at Poetry Atlas or Poetry4U. The former site boasts "thousands" of poems about places (browse by poet name and poem title or first line, or search by location), while the latter allows you to post your own Twitter-length inspirations to a Google map. (My thanks to Harriet the Blog for the links.) 

✭ I was privileged to see the premiere of choreographer Bill T. Jones's "Fondly Do We Hope. . . Fervently Do We Pray", which honors the Bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln. I found it an engrossing piece of dance-theatre. Last month, American Masters broadcast Bill T. Jones: A Good Man, a chronicle of Jones's creation of this and other work. In the following video interview, Jones talks briefly about his creative process and inspiration. For screening information, go here.



Additional videos, a biographical essay and tribute, interviews, and related information are found in the sidebar here.

Jeffrey Brown of the PBS News Hour Art Beat program talked with Jones in 2009 about the choreography.

Here's the official trailer for the documentary:



Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company on FaceBook (Videos on FaceBook)


A Good Man on FaceBook

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

4 comments:

Louise Gallagher said...

For the 52nd Saturday this year,you have filled with world with wonder in the morning.

Love Siddique's animated poem -- we are more contained and unable to contain more -- fabulous work!

On my iPad it is hard to download the videos so will be coming back next week when 'm back on my laptop to wander the wonder you present.

Thank you my friend for a year of wonder. May 2012 fill your world with all the wonder and awe you so richly deserve.

Hugs

Kathleen said...

Oh, wonderful! Thank you for your generosity all year.

S. Etole said...

Such a variety of wonders you share with us. May your New Year be filled with wonder.

Anonymous said...

2012
let's get this show on the road!