creativiteach

I’ll admit, I’m one of those boring people who don’t have a bracket, have no clue which teams are doing well, and really don’t care (OK, except for the UConn women—a person has to have some loyalties!) To me, “bracketology” sounds like a medical specialty, but I know to many students, it is a March obsession.

That’s why I loved last week’s New York Times’ Poetry Pairings blog. Each week Poetry Pairings matches a work from the American Life in Poetry project with something in the news. Last week the match was March Madness and the Jabberwocky, linking the Jabberwocky with a children’s book review written in the context of basketball. Don’t you just love it? A few weeks ago the pairing tied a 19^th century poem to Whitney Houston’s obituary. How about tying poetry to the Races Remixed series?

If one path to creativity is bringing together diverse ideas and disciplines, Poetry Pairings is a stroke of genius. We understand poetry better through the lens of contemporary writing—but we also may understand today’s news, ideas, and challenges better through the lens of poetry. What a great pairing. For a more complete list of poetry pairings, see their index page.