IDEA & GOALS:
Poetry is the spiritual language of our everyday. It captures traces of present moments, travels swiftly from mouth to mindfulness-post-its, pens, pages, or again mouths, and resonates nimbly across the astonishing diversity of human languages and experiences. Although world literature anthologies have since the 2000s facilitated the access to and encouraged the comparative contemplation of poetries from many times and places, they have struggled over how to arrange them and insert them into a fixed system. But the sequestration by country and language, or chronology and form obscures the living resonances and ongoing growth of world poetries—a challenge that we counter by digitally building a “living anthology,” a forest of Trees of Life.
Students and mentors will become interactive “anthologists,” builders of a website that features comparative couplings of resonating poems from any place, time, and medium. The poem pairs will appear in the original language and English translation; they are accompanied by brief personal reflections captured in video shorts on the significance and resonances of the poem for the “anthologist” who chose them; and they are framed by explanatory texts that uncover the historical, cultural, and aesthetic underpinnings of the poems and their literary traditions.
The project will start with a small team of colleagues and their students who will build and contribute to the basic website. Once the website is published, we invite the world’s netizens to further grow the many seeds of resonating poetic pairs into larger “trees of life” by adding resonating poems from other traditions, new poems, or translations and adaptations across the world’s languages, including their own recorded reflections and explanatory texts. We hope that our living digital poetry trees will find their way into classrooms around the world where resonances between past, present, and future poetic imaginations will merge, as they move us along the particular concerns and passions of our historical moment.