Poetry Meets the Techno World and the Whole Damned Thing Gets Weirder

OK, it's probably me. Well, at least the Puritan, New England guilt that leeches from the granite and into my whole being is willing to accept the responsibility and required penance for trying to create a podcast of me reading and giving hints and suggestions for finding commonalities among the poems of John Keats, Wendell Berry, and myself. I am still trying to figure out if it was Keats' shade that objected most to his poem being read on a podcast, or if it's the punishment for the sin of hubris (OK, mixing Greek mythological retribution and Puritanism here, but it works in my head) of reading my own work into a microphone and hoping to post it out there in the aether. Actually, the Greek metaphor is working well here, as the downloaded converter (aptly called Lame) that I was supposed to use to transform my podcast file into an mp3 for uploading (and downloading) purposes carried a Trojan. Thank goodness my computer security caught it and blocked it (I have mental images of a burly kilted warrior with long mustaches blocking the computer...yes, I have McAfee).

For what it's worth, I was reading and asking the listeners to consider and find common elements among the three poems: Keats' "When I Have Fears," Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things," and a poem in progress of my own. This paired and compared poem exercise is not a new idea in my classes, but I thought it would be a useful project to transform the idea to a podcast (final project for class), and demonstrate to my students that a/ I am not a Luddite, and b/ poetry is an aural and oral art, and hearing it read makes a world of difference.

That all being said, my Prof is helping me figure this meshuggah mess out.

How's that for being multicultural? Puritans, Greeks, Yiddish, and TechnoSpeak. woot, me.