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The folks over at the Academy of American Poets have decided that April 17th will be the first-ever national "Poem in Your Pocket" day. It's been an annual event in New York City since 2002, and this year it's going national. Or perhaps global.

The entire "movement" in NYC was inspired by this poem by children's author Beatrice Schenk de Regniers called "Keep a Poem in Your Pocket":

Keep a Poem in Your Pocket
by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

Keep a poem in your pocket
And a picture in your head
And you'll never feel lonely
At night when you're in bed.

The little poem will sing to you
The little picture bring to you
A dozen dreams to dance to you
At night when you're in bed.

So - -
Keep a picture in your pocket
And a poem in your head
And you'll never feel lonely
At night when you're in bed.

You can download a pocket-sized version of this poem from NYC.gov.

Teachers have been using "poem in my pocket" activities for the past few years as well. Many of them relate to one of my favorite children's poets, Tony Mitton, who has written a marvelous poem about keeping a poem in one's pocket as part of his poetry collection My Hat and All That:

In my pocket,
feeling round,
what can this be
that I've found?

Pull it out to see
and - oooh!
Look: a poem
just for you.

Another great resource for use with kids? Bobbi Katz's book, Pocket Poems, illustrated by Marilyn Hafner. It leads off with "A Pocket Poem."

A Pocket Poem
by Bobbi Katz

With a poem in your pocket
and
a pocket in your pants
you can rock with new rhythms.
You can sing.
You can dance.
And wherever you go,
and whatever you do,
that poem in your pocket is going there, too.
read the rest here

But pocket poems aren't just for kids. This link will take you to an array of "pockets", each bearing a single word. At the top left, "frog" will get you a printable pocket-sized copy of "I'm Nobody! Who are You?" by Emily Dickinson. Below it, "roses" will bring you Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which begins "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun". Both Shakespeare and Dickinson have more than one poem in the array, with poems by others including Sara Teasdale, Wilfred Owen, Gerard Manley Hopkins and more.

I hope you'll take some time between now and next Thursday to find a poem that fits your pocket, and that when Thursday, April 17th comes, you'll share it with some people in your corner of the world.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I adore the work of British poet, Tony Mitton. You may recall me mentioning this book during my interview with Tony Mitton last summer. Originally released in the UK with title Perky Little Penguins, it was brought to the US market with the altered title Playful Little Penguins. While I bemoaned the change as not exactly necessary (as did the folks at Kirkus), I can assure you that the rhymes in this book are tight and, for want of a better word, playful, and that the bright illustrations by Guy Parker-Rees are happy-happy-happy.

The poem is structured in a sort of verse and chorus style. Hence, one "verse" reads: "Playful little penguins/coming out today/looking for their furry friends/ . . . Here they are— hooray!" The verses describe the actions that the penguins take: Throughout the book, the penguins slide and scoot and try to cheer up a baby seal who has been separated from her mother. But the "choruses" are where the emotional payoffs are, in my opinion. They not only sum up, but they state or imply emotion as well. Here's the first "chorus" in the book: "Playful little penguins/in the wintry weather—/that's how penguins like to move,/waddling 'round together." (Togetherness is a big thing for these penguins, and playfulness implies happiness as well, to my thinking.) And here is the very last "chorus" in the book, after the penguins have entertained the seal cub and accomplished their task of distracting her and making her happy until her mother turns up:

Sleepy little penguins
in a happy huddle—
that's how penguins like to rest,
in a cozy cuddle!

Happy sigh. The penguins are drowsy and happy and cozied up together. I expect that most children, upon hitting that last page, with its images of penguins huddled in pairs and groups, will smile broadly, and then say "AGAIN!" And well they should.

Fans of rhyme will love this one for its metric beat, which is based on accented beats per line as opposed to syllable counts: two stressed beats per line, the same formula in "verses" and "choruses". And yet, the what I'm calling the "choruses" has a slightly different feel to it somehow. Perhaps it's that the "choruses" are usually presented together on one page, while the verses are spread across pages, but I think there's something about the "chorus"-feeling parts that requires a slighly slower reading pace when reading it aloud. And this book cries out to be read aloud.

I'd advise folks with young children to get their hands on Tony Mitton's penguins. Whether you choose the Playful or Perky version is up to you.

Many people have worked hard on ALA’s I Love Libraries website. I know this because I was (in a small way) one of them.The site was advertised in the State of America’s Libraries published by ALA in April but didn’t go live until this week, just in time for Annual. In the intervening time we got what can only be described as a sub-par “coming soon” page which is really amazing to me considering that the URL had already been widely distributed.

I don’t see much need to pick apart the website page by page, but I do have some critiques that I hope will be illustrative or helpful.

1. Who didn’t learn anything about long URLs? ALA didn’t. There is no reason in 2007 to have that much extra junk in a URL.
2. In 2007, a “find your library” page should not go to a list of links of how you can find your library. It should go to a search box or a map.
3. Don’t hide your blog. Don’t bury new content at the bottom of your main page.
4. Things professional websites have that this one doesn’t: favicons, copyright statements in the footer or on the legal page not up top looking defensive, an overall design sensibility, content (not just links to content), an about us page with the names of real people on it, valid markup, alt text for images, accessible coding, valid security certificates, copyright statements that word wrap appropriately.
5. The rules for adding content to the Ilovelibraries.org Flickr group exclude humans and allow only institutions. Which 2.0 guideline does this violate? I asked to join. I never even heard back from the group moderator. Why is this restriction necessary?

In short, this is a 1.0 site that is pretending to be a 2.0 site and is a perfect example of how all the blogging tools in the world won’t make your organization responsive and interactive if your corporate culture is restrictive and controlling. Put another way, I’ve been clicking around this site for half an hour and I don’t even know what it’s trying to do. It’s all over the place. Is it to raise money for ALA and libraries in various ways? Is it a way to ask questions and get information about libraries? Is it a way to share content and/or my love of libraries with other people? Is it a way to push ALA content at more than the usual suspects? Is it a way to make ALA seem hipper and more “with it”? The about this site page is unrevealing: “Simply put, you love libraries, and we hope this Web site will keep it that way!” Huh.

I feel like if we could understand why ALA thinks ilovelibraries.org is a good, well-designed website for achieving their goals, we might understand more about why people have a hard time with technology and why there is such a digital divide in librarianship, much less among the public at large. For now it remains a bit of a mystery, at least to me.