Artists of the Floating URL

Information About Portfolios and Final Papers

2011-06-01T15:04:00.003-04:00

Your portfolios and final papers are due June 10.

Your portfolio should contain the following:

All graded work I have given you in the front pocket.
All handouts that you have in the main (hole-punched) portion.
Four poems: (1) the sonnet you wrote for the midterm (does not need to be revised unless I instructed you to do so); (2) the "Song of..." you wrote during the second half of the term; (3) two poems that you wrote, of your choice. All of these must be typed and in the back pocket of your portfolio.

In addition, your final paper is also due June 10. Click here for information about how to begin your final paper, due June 10. Please make sure your paper is double-spaced and the typeface is no smaller than 10 point nor larger than 12 point. The page count must be at least 3 full pages and no more than 8 pages. Your folder portfolio is also due on June 10.

You are strongly encouraged to send me the paper electronically via Google Docs or directly to my email account at lisaschamess@gmail.com by midnight on June 9. On June 10 and 13 we will watch the film Microcosmos. On June 14 and 15 we will review the requirements for the technical language exercise that each student will do for the class on Friday June 17 instead of a formal final.

Your paper will be worth 80 percent of the final grade; the June 17 technical language exercise will be worth 20 percent.

Tuesday Creative Writing

2011-05-26T11:28:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, we will have an extended writing period to work on the Whitmanesque Songs that are due with your final portfolio on June 10. Ms. Galland is in charge.

Up till now, we have let Whitman be the model for these poems. But poets are influenced by more than one great writer. In this exercise, I'd like you to choose one or two additional poets to mimic and experiment with.

Please go through this poetry packet over the weekend and choose/print out one or two poems from it to study and mimic closely. Then on Tuesday, please be prepared to work for an extended period during class, using reference points and approaches from the poem:

imagery
line length
punctuation
sound patterns (e.g., alliteration, consonance)
rhyme schemes (if it is a rhymed poem)
stanza length
repetition of phrases or lines
rhetoric devices, if they exist (e.g., anaphora, epistrophe, chiasmus)
meter (overall pattern if it is a metered poem, or any lines of specific, deliberate meter in an otherwise unmetered poem--NOTE: the use of meter in an unmetered poem is distinguished by one or more full lines of a sustained pattern)

Leave your journals in class so I can check your work on Wednesday. Email me if you have any questions: lisaschamess@gmail.com

Demarro on Edgar Allen Poe

2011-05-24T02:23:00.000-04:00

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 and died October 7, 1849. He was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth Poe.

Poe's parents separated and his mother died when he was 2 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a Scottish merchant from Richmond, Virginia and his wife. Poe's Richmond connection is the reason for The Poe Museum's location there.

When he was 6, Poe went to school in London and Scotland, where he learned Latin and French, as well as math and history. He returned to America to continue his studies. Poe went to the University of Virginia when he was 17. John Allan had plenty of money, but only gave Poe a third of what he needed. Poe was doing well in school, but developed a drinking problem, and eventually had to quit school. He was broke, with no skills, so he decided to join the army, but that didn't last very long. He went to New York City where some of his poetry was eventually published and he became an editor of his newpaper through a contest he won with his story "The Manuscript Found in a Bottle."

He married his cousin who was 13 when he was 27. He became the editor of Southern Literary Messenger, but left because of poor salary. He moved to Philadelphia in 1838 where he wrote "Ligeia" and "The Haunted Palace". His first volume of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in 1839. In 1840 Poe published his first detective story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Poe was poor and barely making enough to support his family, His short story "The Gold Bug" did make a little money, but not enough. He eventually moved back to New York. In 1845 Poe became an editor at The Broadway Journal, the journal ran out of money and Poe was out of a job. The same year his poem The Raven was published in a magazine. His wife Virginia's health was fading away and he started drinking heavily once again. She died 10 days after his birthday in 1847. Poe returned to restore a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster.

On October 3, 1849 Poe was found lying in the streets of Baltimore delirious. He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died on October 7 the nature of his death was never explained.

Poe was a poet, editor, and literary critic. He was best known for his dark and gothic poetry with recurring themes were death, mourning and premature burial. Poe also wrote a number of satires and humor tales.

Nico on Nikki

2011-05-19T22:13:00.001-04:00

Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. She began her studies at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her main focuses are on civil rights and equality. She is also a very strong voice for the black community: not just a poet but also a writer, activist, and educator.

Giovanni teaches English class at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. You will notice that much of her early material was inspired by the civil rights and Black Power movements, such as Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967) and Black Judgement (1968).

In her works she is trying to tell people that they have the power to help change their lives or someone else's. For more information on Nikki Giovanni, go to this link.

Unique on Joy Harjo

2011-05-19T22:12:00.000-04:00

Joy Harjo was born on May 9, 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is known to be a musician, poet, and author. Harjo has played alto saxophone with a band called Poetic Justice, and has also edited literary journals and written screenplays. Her books include In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell From The Sky, and The Spiral of Memory. She’s a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and is of Cherokee descent. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Sarah on Robert Frost

2011-05-19T21:24:00.000-04:00

Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874 and lived until January 29, 1963. He was and is still considered one of the chief poets of America, easily the most well-known by the American people. His fame started to grow in the 1920s, when his work was considered very unique compared to that of the other poets of that era. Frost's poetry is known for being written in a very realistic, down-to-earth, relatable, style with many of the images and subjects having been taken from everyday life, and very often nature. This allowed a much broader audience of people to understand and admire his work. The first collection of poetry which became known internationally and held many of his most well-known poems was North Boston, written in 1914. In 1916, he released the third collection of his work, Mountain Interval, which contained one of his most famous poems to this day, 'The Road Not Taken.' More on Robert Frost at this link.

Ian on Charles Baudelaire

2011-05-18T11:49:00.000-04:00

Charles Baudelaire was born in 1821 in Paris to Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays. His father died when he was just six years old and his mother remarried to Major Jacques Aupick. They moved to Lyons in 1833 and Charles was forced to attend a military boarding school, which he was kicked out of for refusing to hand over a note passed to him. He went and spent two years living a bohemian lifestyle in the Latin Quarter of Paris, contracting syphilis sometime along the way.

His family (driven by his step-father) decided to ship Baudelaire off to India in 1841 in an attempt to beat the bohemian out of him. He was back in Paris by the next year, to collect his inheritance. He ended up living as a Dandy, which is like the wealthy cousin of the bohemian. In his lavish spending he managed to spend half the family fortune in two years. His family took him to court and got him a “wealth management” lawyer who gave him a tiny allowance regularly paid for the rest of his life. He supplemented this income as an art critic. His first published book of poetry had descriptions of lesbian love and vampires and thus was considered “obscene” by the bourgeois people of Paris. He continued publishing until his death at the hands of syphilis on august 31, 1867. He was 46 years old.

His work is very vivid and reflects a lot of the ideology of dandyism and bohemianism. Before this I had heard his name before in relation to dandyism, but never really looked into who he was. Overall he represents both of these archetypes, which makes his work very interesting.

[Ms. Schamess notes: Ian, you need a third link--can you find us a really rich resource devoted only to Baudelaire's work? I am sure it exists]

Destinee on Tupac Shakur

2011-05-17T12:55:00.002-04:00

Tupac Amaru Shakur, the rapper, actor, and poet, was born June 16,1971 in Brooklyn, NY and died September 13, 1996 in LA, California. He was born with the name Lesane Parish Crooks, but while still a small child his mother, Afeni Shakur, changed his name to Tupac Amaru Shakur. He was named after Túpac Amaru II, a Peruvian revolutionary who led an indigenous uprising against Spain and was subsequently executed.

Shakur--also known simply as Tupac or 2pac--was the son of a Black Panther activists. He moved around a lot as a child. In his youth, he explored acting by becoming a member of the 127th Street Ensemble, a Harlem-based theater company. As a teenager, Shakur attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he took acting and dance classes, including ballet. While living in Baltimore, he discovered rap and began performing as MC New York. In the late 1980s, Shakur and his family moved to the West Coast. He joined the Oakland, California-based hip-hop group Digital Underground, which earlier had scored a hit with the song "The Humpty Dance", where in the video he was a background dancer. In 1991 he went solo and made two gold, one platinum, two 2x platinum, one 4x platinum, and one 9x platinum albums within the next six years. He starred in several films such as the 1992 film Juice and the 1993 film Poetic Justice co-staring Janet Jackson. There have been several documentaries about his life and death.
In 1994, he spent several days in jail for assaulting director Allen Hughes and was later convicted of sexual assault in another case. Shakur himself fell victim to violence, getting shot five times in the lobby of a recording studio during a mugging. The next year, after recovering from his injuries, Shakur was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in the sexual assault case. After serving eight months in prison, Shakur returned to music. During his career, Shakur had become embroiled in a feud between East Coast and West Coast rappers. He was known to insult his enemies on his tracks. On a trip to Las Vegas to attend a boxing match, Shakur was shot while riding in a car driven by Knight on September 7, 1996. He died six days later on September 13 from his injuries. His killer has never been caught. Since his death, numerous albums of his work have been released, selling millions of copies. In his life time he wrote a little over 70 poems and and book the rose that grew from concrete, a book of poetry.More poetry is at this link.

[Ms. Schamess notes: it'd be nice to have an excerpt or short poem here too. Like...]

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.

David on Theodore Roethke

2011-05-17T12:43:00.000-04:00

Theodore Roethke was born on May 25, 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan to Otto Roethke, a German immigrant who owned a local greenhouse along with his brother, Theodore’s uncle. Roethke spent many hours as a child playing in and around this greenhouse, which greatly influenced his poetry. Roethke’s adolescence was greatly disrupted when at the age of 15, his uncle committed suicide and his father died of cancer only a few months apart. While this is not known, I believe this was the impetus for his numerous bouts with depression and alcoholism, both of which appeared much later in his life.

Roethke attended the University of Michigan and before he could obtain a graduate degree from Harvard, dropped out to become a teacher because of the great depression. It was while teaching at Michigan State University that he first experienced depression; however, this helped advance his poetry.

Roethke’s first book, Open House, was published in 1941, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize as well as two National Book Awards. Roethke’s last teaching job was at the University of Washington, where he established a reputation as a crazy, but brilliant professor. Roethke suffered a heart attack and died in a friend’s swimming pool at age 55 in 1963. The pool has since been turned into a Zen rock garden.

Alexandra on Lisa Sandell

2011-05-16T19:40:00.023-04:00

Lisa Ann Sandell was born in Wilmington, Delaware on November 23, 1977. As a child, she spent most of her free time reading. She started writing short stories at a young age. She went to University of Pennsylvania where she took classes on English Medieval and Renaissance Literature about King Arthur, which became her inspiration for Song of the Sparrow. She spent her summer between sophomore and junior years in college in Israel which became the topic of The Weight of the Sky. After returning to the States, she became homesick and started to write poetry about Israel. One of these poems turned into the outline for The Weight of the Sky. She moved back to Israel for a year as an intern at The Jerusalem Report.

She moved back to the States in 2000 and works as a children’s book editor in New York. I read both of Lisa Ann Sandell’s books, The Song of the Sparrow and The Weight of the Sky, in middle school. The Song of the Sparrow is a poetic twist on the story of Elaine, The Lady of Shalott, who floats down a river and kills herself after Lancelot falls in love with Gwynivere. This story takes characters from Tristan, who fell in love with Isolde, to Arthur. The Weight of the Sky is Sandell’s first book, and tells the story of a Jewish girl in high school from a small town whose parents have planned a trip to Israel to work on a kibbutz to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. This book goes through the hardships many teenage girls go through and how the main character, Sarah, grows and matures as a person.

This is an excerpt from The Song of the Sparrow, the beginning of Chapter 18:

Morning dawns grey
and ominous, the sky
pregnant with indigo clouds.
As I rise from my bed,
I sense that I am alone
in the tent, my family
already gone to
the mock
battlefield. In these
moments of silence
I do my chores, sort through
my herbs and take stock of
what is needed.
Handling the colorful powders
and scented flowers calms me,
allows quiet into my head.
I must think on my plan.
A list begins to form in my mind,
and suddenly I wonder, how will
I ever manage to gather all that
I might need and prepare
a kit for the journey
without anyone seeing, guessing?
For I shall follow.
There are no hiding places in this
tent, no private spots
in this camp.
As I scan the room, looking
for a nook to secret away
a sack, my eyes fall
upon my mother’s chest.
Yes, there should be room inside
of it, to squirrel away medicinal
plants, some clothes and food.
And no one will think to look there.
The domain of woman.

This is the end of "Swallowed Up," an excerpt from The Weight of the Sky:

The features of my face
blur together
then crystallize for
a second. They
don’t seem to be organic parts
of me.
They come apart, like
pieces
of
   a
   jigsaw
   puzzle.
A nose floats away, unanchored
from my cheeks,
and there it is, just a nose,
a funny-looking thing
with two holes in it,
hanging in the air.
And a pair of gray-green eyes,
the color of mud,
but I only see one, as the two
merge in the center of my forehead
like a Cyclops.
Who am I?
What am I doing?

Shira on Allen Ginsberg

2011-05-16T19:31:00.002-04:00

Allen Ginsberg, photographed by William S. Burroughs on the rooftop of his Lower East Side apartment building, 1953.

"Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art."
– Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3rd, 1926 and died April 5th, 1997. He published his works from age 21 to his death. Many remember him for his dramatic reading of his iconic poem Howl in San Fransisco, but all of his poems alone measured over 1,200 pages. "Kaddish" told the story of his mother and her war with psychotic episodes, which led to her lobotomy. The Allen Ginsberg Project site has a wonderful wealth of information on Ginsberg's life and travels, while The Academy of American Poets site (poets.org) focuses more on what influenced him. Both sites touch on his versatility, but I find it's something you need to see to believe.

Look at poems such as "In Society,"and "Newt Gingrich Declares War on “McGovernik Counterculture”* (contained in a collection of his last poems). I would also suggest looking in to Fie My Fum and Pull My Daisy, as well as Please Open The Window and Let Me In, and, of course, Kaddish and Howl.

During my research I also found a very cool collage here.

*Note from Ms. Schamess: Be a bit careful of using comments on a board, listserve, Reddit, etc. as a source. I did check a couple of places to make absolute sure this poem was indeed written by Ginsberg, so this reference is okay.

Andrew on Leonard Cohen

2011-05-15T00:44:00.001-04:00

For my blog post and, probably, my lesson, I chose Leonard Cohen. Initially, I only knew him as a songwriter and musician, and was first directly exposed to his work in The Watchmen soundtrack’s with the song "First We Take Manhattan." This project led to my first knowledge of his involvement in poetry and writing.

Cohen was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on a September day in 1934. He grew up in a Lithuanian-Polish family of Jewish ancestry, and as he described, “had a very messianic childhood.” In his early childhood (some sources say at 9, others - 10), his father died, leaving a permanent mark on Cohen’s personal and literary lives. By the time he turned 16, Cohen began playing the guitar, and became a dedicated reader of García Lorca.

Cohen has been active in the literary community for a little over half of a century, singing, songwriting, and writing novels and poems. He started writing poetry in an undergraduate program at McGill university, with his first book being published in the McGill Poetry Series, and continued to write well in to the 2000s, though he’s too busy recording his newest studio album to push it into the 2010s.

I’m not entirely positive exactly where I want to take the lesson, though I do have some particular ideas that I want to explore further. A possibility would be to explore the mid- and post-WWII world that Cohen matured into, as well as the way that war and politics tie into his work. A possible poem that could accompany that route might be "S.O.S."

[Note from Ms. Schamess: another angle could be Cohen's study of Buddhism, for which you seem to have already found a link.]

Finally, after scouring the Internet for interview, I found a little gem of a quote from Cohen describing his writing process: “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."

Poets at Work: Patti Smith

2011-05-10T11:40:00.007-04:00

To kick off our Poetry Projects, I will do a sample focused on contemporary songwriter and poet Patti Smith.

Patricia Lee Smith was born on December 30--my daughter's birthday!--into an Irish-American Protestant family in Chicago, in 1946. Her father was a military serviceman, and the family was very poor. She recalls in her biography, Just Kids, being taught her prayers by her mother. Smith quickly became fascinated by prayer, insisting on making up her own, which she said started as long monologues but instead became extended, deep forms of "listening" to the Divine. She said that praying gave her the "entrance into the radiance of the imagination."

This amazes me, as Patti Smith's public persona has been associated with hard and wild living, beginning when she dropped out of high school and hitchhiked to New York and carrying through to her life as a rocker and performance artist in the 1960s and 1970s. To the astonishment of her public, Smith retired abruptly from public life in 1980 to marry and raise a family. After her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith died in 1994, she returned to public singing and writing.

In the 1960s--the subject of her autobiography Just Kids, Smith recalls the influence of artist Robert Mapplethorpe on her life, and references her continued connection to spiritual life: “. . .by his example, I understand that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God being a poem, the weave of color and graphite scratched upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution.” Also important to her--although not on such a personal level--are Beat poets such as Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.

Smith has produced more than 15 records and almost 20 books, including books of poetry. That's all I have found out so far. I have liked her music a lot up until now, and now her work is beginning to really fascinate me.

Sources:
Just Kids, Patti Smith's biography (Harper Collins, 2010)
Patti Smith's web site at http://www.pattismith.net/
The web site Thought Catalog

Song of the Universal

2011-04-15T13:10:00.004-04:00

NOTE: This is a preview post of the writing and reading assignment for in class on Monday. See below for the reading on Conference of the Birds that I also asked you to do. See you Tuesday!

Walt Whitman was a person like any other. It's interesting to reflect on this, seeing his own handwriting, his words. Of course, penmanship has changed a lot in the years since he wrote out "Song of the Universal" in this draft from June 1874. But still.

Doesn't it seem amazingly human, vulnerable, written out as it is here? And yet, with what authority he says:

"In this broad earth of ours,

Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,

Enclosed and safe within its central heart,

Nestles the seed perfection."

If you could write your own vulnerable yet authoritative song of yourself or song of the universal, what would you say? Find out.

Use either the link to "Song of the Universal" or the short version of "Song of Myself" that I have linked above. The full version is also available--without the line breaks--from pages 25-69 in the big green book. For some reason, the typesetters did not observe any line breaks in this inexpensive edition, but you can still tell where they are by the internal capitalization within lines.

Start your "song of..." project by jotting notes in your journal, plating with phrases, mucking about. Remember that you are speaking both for yourself and for a broader "self" with whom you want your readers to identify. Use amazing words large and small. Words like these:

sweep

cherish

dust

amaze

stir

taste

echo/echoes

dance

blush

brusque

channel

house

heart

doorway

hair

smoke

death / dying / birth / living

eyes

sun

stars

power

awe

fire

blaze

snow

rain

and so forth...

Look here for more inspiring words. Assemble your song in 10 lines or more, as long as you please, not rhyming, with lots of commas and semi-colons and 'ands' and other usually forbidden over-the-topness.

"Longing is the most creative state..."

2011-04-14T12:39:00.002-04:00

"...that the soul can reach."

So says Sologak in this blog entry on the soul as a bird in Persian literature. Read through it to find out such things as this:

The Persian word for falcon is baz, which is also a pun because baz means "come back." Thus the falcon in Conference of the Birds represents the return of the soul, which may fight the service of the Divine but must eventually come back to it.

The Conference of the Birds is 9,000 lines long.

There are seven stages or "valleys" of searching for the Divine in Sufi belief.

The word "simurgh" stands both for a single mythical bird and for 30 (si) birds (murgh) in Farsi.

What else can you discover through this reading?

[Image of the simurgh is via this link at Muslim Heritage.]

"The Wise Silence"

2011-03-11T08:25:00.005-05:00

Over the next week, we will be examining parts of "The Poet," a very dense and expressive essay calling for a new American poetry, which he delivered in 1844, and which Walt Whitman attended and took to heart, determining himself to be the man to create this poetry. See if you can take in what Emerson is saying--don't worry if at first you feel lost. Emerson is a challenging writer, and we will look at this together in class.

For a smaller assignment, please respond (on this blog, with your name in the comment) to this quote from another essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 1841 essay "The Oversoul." Answer to two aspects in your response: (1) how does this quote strike you personally? Does it relate to your own feelings or view on life? (2) how do you see this idea of Emerson's reflected in some of the work we have read or attempted to date? Please give specific examples.

Here's the quote:

"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul."

Einstein's Brain

2011-03-10T11:08:00.002-05:00

Scroll down in this link to view the astrocytes in a human brain at work.

Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up

2011-03-08T01:23:00.001-05:00

Have a little fun with the sonnet form by going to this site to create a patchwork sonnet from lines that good Will already gave the world.

When you're done, cut and paste the result into the comments section below this post (you'll have to edit out the portions of the line that show where the original line of poetry came from).

Happy sonneteering.

All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here

2011-02-28T22:49:00.002-05:00

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate.

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself...

Nature and the Mute Poetry of Seeing

2011-02-11T12:16:00.012-05:00

We've talked in class these past few weeks about how poetry represents a movement from the mute and inarticulate moment of noticing to the act of articulating what is there. Often, we are most aware of this movement when we contemplate nature. Here are some links to follow, for fun and understanding (what good is one without the other?).

Please take a look, and tell us what you saw.

Carlo Maggia: In Cahoots With Nature

Andy Goldsworthy - click on each image to get a story about how it was made

greenmuseum.org - make sure and check out the link to "What Is Environmental Art?" and links to some of the artists.

Code Name: "I See the Wire"

2011-02-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

Ah, thanks for stopping by. If you actually did visit this site as instructed, you can let me know by saying "I see the wire" when you see me again.

Want to see the wire? Look closely at this photo.

And then at this from the Library of Congress's "Revising Himself: Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass":

Whitman and the Butterfly

This photograph, taken in 1877, was one of Whitman's favorites. He used the butterfly-on-hand as a recurring motif in his books and intended for this photo to be reproduced as the frontispiece in this sample proof of Leaves from 1891. To foster the image of himself as one with nature, he claimed that insect was real and one of his "good friends." But a band visible around Whitman's finger matches the wire under the butterfly artifact (above). This colorful cardboard prop was tucked into one of the first Whitman notebooks donated to the Library in 1918. The word "Easter" is printed down its spine. Dr. Bucke, one of his literary heirs, said the butterfly was Psyche, the poet's soul.

Whitman's Butterfly

2011-02-07T05:34:00.005-05:00

Let's continue our exploration of Walt Whitman with a bit of lepidoptery. Your mission for the next few weeks is to discover what you can about Walt Whitman's cardboard butterfly.

Yes, that's right. I want you to hunt a butterfly through the Internet. You may take a companion on this journey...a friend, a classmate, a parent, a sibling. Anyone with a taste for this timid adventure will do.

Answers? There are no particular answers. Just bring back some interesting observations of this curious phenom anytime this term.

Start here.

[images via Library of Congress American Memory program]

Fuzzy Boundaries

2006-02-15T07:11:00.013-05:00

Let's start with a little light reading:

"...And provided also, That the said state shall have concurrent jurisdiction on the river Mississippi, and every other river bordering on the said state so far as the said rivers shall form a common boundary to the said state; and any other state or states, now or hereafter to be formed and bounded by the same, such rivers to be common to both; and that the river Mississippi, and the navigable rivers and waters leading into the same, shall be common highways, and for ever free, as well to the inhabitants of the said state as to other citizens of the United States, without any tax, duty impost, or toll, therefor, imposed by the said state."

Whew. You got all that? Me too.

Basically, all that language from Congress's Conference Committee Report on the Missouri Compromise says that Missouri was accepted into the United States as a slave state in 1820, the same year Maine was accepted as a non-slave state, thus keeping the delicate balance even. And that further, Missouri was considered to have jurisdiction over half the Mississippi River, while its neighboring states had jurisdiction over the other half.

O-kay. So how you do divide a river? On the one hand it seems simple enough, but in practice, out on the water...it's a little iffy, ain't it?

So all along the way through history, because of the river and because of the state's geographic position, Missouri stayed sort-of iffy. Not quite Mississippi, and not quite Illinois.

Today, the concept of slavery--long thought to be abolished--is still pretty iffy, too. Click here to see areas in the world that are considered to still harbor slavery. You will be a bit surprised.