Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

If you're just browsing today's edition, be sure to not miss the The Lively Morgue, No Mind, or the animation of a Wislawa Szymborska poem!

✦ The New York Times now has a marvelous Tumblr site for its extraordinary images archive: The Lively Morgue. Read the About page to gain some perspective on just how large the archive is: "If we posted 10 new archival pictures every weekday on Tumblr, just from our print collection, we wouldn't have the whole thing online until the year 3935." Best to start looking now! Prints of the images are available to purchase.

✦ In case you missed it, go here to read the first online poetry issue from the nonprofit, bi-annual lit journal Barrelhouse. Be sure to take a moment to explore the other online offerings, too.

✦ Are you a thinker looking for like-minded souls? Check out Christian Jackson's No Mind site, which describes itself as "a thinker's blog dedicated to the faculty of wonder. . . an attempt to see the world through the magician's eyes. . . ." Jackson is a graphic designer; take a moment to visit his Square Inch Design Blog.

✦ Have you allowed your students, kindergarten through grade 12, to express their dreams in poems? Through The Dream Flag Project, an annual poetry-art-and-community-connection project, students look for inspiration in the poetry of Langston Hughes, then write their own poems and transfer them to cloth cut like Nepalese Buddhist prayer flags. Go here to learn about the project and how you and your students can participate. (My thanks to NewPages blog for the link to the resource-rich site.)

✦ If you love books, you'll also love Little Free Library, where you'll find images of all shapes and sizes of libraries and an invitation to order a one-of-a-kind mini library of your own or start with a pre-constructed model and add your own artwork. The site also includes plans and tips for building a little library.

Ben Jones, "Little Free Libraries Are Taking Root on Lawns", USAToday, February 21, 2012

✦ At Lexicalist, you can have fun looking up collections of comparative demographics, including fast food in America and popular television shows. Demographic trends in popular topics and slang among men, women, and different age groups also are featured. Use Lexicalist China to explore language usage in that country. (My thanks to Arts Beat blog for the site link.)

✦ Below is an animation of the poem "Advertisement" by the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. The poem is read by Flora Coker. The video is included in the Poetry Everwhere series from the Poetry Foundation.

Profiles for Wislawa Szymborska at Academy of American Poets, Poetry Foundation, and Culture PL (Resource Library, Literature and Writers from Poland)

Szymborska Poems at Poland on the Web

Translations of Szymborska Poems by Joanna Maria Trzeciak