Daily Poem Instructions
In honor of Lamont Library’s 60th Anniversary, the Woodberry Poetry Room invites you to participate in our DAILY POEM project. Join us in this time-honored tradition of the daily poem, a practice that Harvard alum Frank O’Hara used so adeptly during his lunch-hours at MOMA that he published them in a groundbreaking collection called Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964). Our DAILY POEM project also honors the surrealist exercise known as “Exquisite Corpse,” a communal creation or e-pluribus-unum poetics in which each author adds a single line to the anatomy of a poem. Who knows what variety of associative masterpiece or fantastic erratic draft our many minds will create.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR YOUR DAILY MUSE
Each weekday throughout National Poetry Month, the Curator will post a title (drawn from a poem in the Poetry Room collection). The name of the poet will be noted in parentheses.
1. To contribute a line to the day’s poem, click on “Edit this entry”. Move the cursor to a new line.
If you are the first contributor of the day, use the title of the poem as your inspiration.
If you are not the first contributor, please free to obey (or defy) the previous line–formally, rhythmically, or thematically. Whatever you do, you must only add one line per person and you must not delete or alter the title or the previous line.
2. Press “Save” (on the right-hand side of the menu).
3. To view your new addition to the poem, click “View This Post.”
4. Please fill in the DAILY POEM Sign-In Sheet on the desk if you would like for your name to be cited as one of the authors for that day’s poem.
5. To view the entire blog, click on the title of the blog at the top of the screen.
