Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – Of quatrains, pentameter and rhyme: Cornell University offers its little, annual book “Poetry in Your Pocket 2011” on April 14 to students participating in New York City’s Poem in Your Pocket Day at Bryant Park and to students at the Cornell-affiliated Food and Finance High School, 525 West 50th Street, New York City.
Cornell’s traditional chapbook, written this year by the eight graduate student writers in Cornell Professor Alice Fulton’s M.F.A. seminar in poetry, will be accompanied this year by a Web site – to be launched April 8 – designed to be read on mobile devices.
The Web site is: poetryinyourpocket.cornell.edu.
“We are so grateful to be sharing these poems with a community of readers,” said Alex Chertok, Cornell MFA ’11, one of the graduate student poets. “Each poem began for us in a quiet place. That’s what our work, all so different from one another, has in common. We wrote these out of the private intensity, of emotion, sometimes an emotion that couldn’t be told in any other form. The poem is often our only way of enunciating pain, of speaking to the dead, of preserving or awakening a piece of history, of exploring where we came from.”
Cornell began participating in Poem in Your Pocket Day in New York City in 2007, with Cornell M.F.A. poets reading in Bryant Park and distributing “A Fragile Index of the World,” a collection of work by Cornell poets published for Cornell President David Skorton’s inauguration. Chapbooks with student verse and artwork have been printed for the annual event since 2008.
Poem in Your Pocket Day is produced by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs and the Bryant Park Corp.
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