Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry

A resource that might be especially useful for teachers of poetry, but also poets, critics, and publishers, is available from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute in collaboration with American University's Center for Social Media and its Washington College of Law. They have created the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry."

Devised specifically by and for the poetry community, this best practices code serves as a guide to reasonable and appropriate uses of copyrighted materials in new and old media.

"This document," says project adviser Lewis Hyde, "brings wonderful clarity to the otherwise opaque world of poetry permissions. It is a useful tool that should serve poets, critics, and publishers alike."

It is available as a free free download (pdf) from the Center for Social Media.

From Pen Pal by Sugar Magnolia Wilson

1.
Hellooo. How are you?

I�ve only just started
witchcraft so this letter
includes some of my hairs.

My two guinea pigs had
million dollar babies �

two lots of babies.

Mum says they have the
eyeless ways of newborns.

Friday and I�m sitting
in the quad under the
acacia tree.

The bell has rung
and I�m waiting for
Mum or Dad to pick me up.

No one has come. It is
strange.

Did I tell you? I

Prompt: Shoveling Snow with the Buddha and Billy Collins

If you are in a part of the world covered with snow, you may identify in that way with this month's model poem: "Shoveling Snow With Buddha" by Billy Collins. Our prompt for February is writing about someone who is well known but in your poem "out of place."

I like that in Collins' poem the Buddha is out of place for several reasons. First, he is doing something and we are used to seeing him seated and meditative. We also usually find him in a nice temperate setting, not in the snow. Of course, he is also out of place because he is out of time, dropped into our present from his past.

Besides the idea that he is helping shovel snow, he is also quite interested in hot chocolate and playing cards after the shoveling - two rewards for his work, not unlike a child's rewards for helping clear the snow.

He is more Buddha-like in his mindfulness of the work.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

Collins is no real life Buddhist, though he is mindful, but the poem touches on several ideas in Buddhism. Like most of Collins' poems, the light, perhaps funny, surface of the poem is a way to slide into more serious points. In this poem, I am reminded about how often we forget that the journey is the destination, and how often we want to be anywhere but in the now.

This prompt asks you to place a well-known person (living or dead, real or fictional) somewhere out of place. There is the suggestion of something absurd in this, although Emily Dickinson at Starbucks is not as odd as if you made her a Victoria's Secret runway model, so the choice is yours when it comes to that aspect of the prompt.

Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015

Love Poems for Valentine's Day

Need some poetic lines (or inspiration) for Valentine's Day?

Try some classic and contemporary love poems from Poets.org.

From "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace...

to

"How to Love" by January Gill O�Neil

After stepping into the world again,
there is that question of how to love,
how to bundle yourself against the frosted morning�
the crunch of icy grass underfoot, the scrape
of cold wipers along the windshield�
and convert time into distance...

"Breathing You In" by David Gregory

From up here it looked

as if the harbour�s lungs inhaled

the fog in through the headlands;

light as breathing, concrete coloured,

it set in for the day, giving us each a
bubble vision

containing what little we know,

and out beyond the garden�s edge;

all life arrested.



There was a fog of the familiar

such that I could not see

all of the changes underway

between you and me.



But

Like a Butterfly by Jennifer Compton