Poetry Pairings and other intriquing spaces

Photo by
Liseanne McDonald
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. – Thomas Jefferson

This is not what I had intended to write about today but I got inspired by Maureen -- over at Writing without Paper who is a fountain of inspiration every day -- and even more so on Saturday's when 'her finds become my finds'. So, I just couldn't avoid a sharing kind of Saturday morning because this find is inspired!

The New York Times' Learning Network has a new column -- Poetry Pairings. To learn more about this fabulous idea, visit Maureen's blog, or The New York Times, Poetry Pairings -- read down, keep reading, keep being amazed by the creativity and wonder of the human spirit.

What wonderful action to add value and beauty into our lives!

So, ever wonder how people come up with these amazing ideas? Is it just that one day someone woke up and said, "Hey! Let's pair poetry and articles/headlines from the New York Times and call it, Poetry Pairings and we'll have a weekly column and it will be incredibly successful and we'll make zillions of dollars and oh, yeah, the poets will get exposure and readership of NYT will go up and the whole world will be happy!"

Maybe...

But more likely, someone had an idea, and created a MindMap to explore the thoughts and possibilities of their idea.

I love mindmaps. When I used to teach creativity to elementary students I called it 'webbing'. Take a central organizing idea (and no, I did not use such big words), put it in the centre of a page and then start webbing from that idea every thought that relates to your central idea. Keep creating until no more thoughts come and then, find the threads that connect -- you can make more and more webs from each central theme -- and voila! A poem appears. A story writes...

Mindmaps have become more formal than my original webbing -- and are still just as powerful.

You can check out some great ideas on Mindmapping, here and here!

And... get inspired by this video from Ted.com. Felix Dennis, publisher, philanthropist, poet, is, as his bio describes him, a "Former hippie, former jailbird, former aficionado of crack cocaine, Felix Dennis built one of the most successful privately owned magazine empires in the world."





Have a wonderful day.

I'm off to enjoy the world of creativity all around me.

Nameste!