The April 8 total solar eclipse has sparked a new opportunity for interactive poetry from Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center.
The university and the city of Kent will be in the path of totality for the eclipse, and numerous visitors are expected to flock to the Kent Campus and the city to experience the phenomenon.
The Wick Poetry Center, which is home to the Poets for Science project, will be offering visitors the chance to express their feelings of awe and wonderment on the eclipse as part of an interactive poetry project titled "Shared Sky" that will live on the Poets for Science website.
“We’re kind of doubling down on bringing poetry into the conversation,” said David Hassler, the Bob and Walt Wick executive director of the center. “We often say the microscope and the metaphor are both instruments of discovery. Here, the telescope, our understanding of the eclipse and metaphors are ways to wrap our heads around the science and the awe and the wonder of the eclipse.”
Hassler has written a poem entitled, “Shared Sky,” to kick off the event and provide inspiration.
The interactive website also offers visitors the chance to read about the science and history of eclipses and then create an online Emerge Erasure Poem, from scientific articles and historical texts.
The poetry method allows the creator to click on words within the text which then are highlighted and formed into a new verse. The site also contains an interactive map, so that those who create a verse can pin it to their location on the map, showing how widespread the poetry project becomes across the globe.
“The whole idea is you can make your own poem and then post it and share it on social media,” Hassler said.
In addition to the online poem, the Wick center will be distributing postcards on which participants can write a poem about the eclipse and have space to include a drawing or other artwork. The postcards then can be uploaded onto the site, which will become a gallery of the poetry and art submissions.
Hassler has been working on the project with Aimee Norton, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Stanford University’s Solar Physics Group; Ryan McGranaghan, Ph.D., data scientist and research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Donald Hassler, Ph.D., science program director for the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and Hassler’s brother.
On the day of the eclipse, Hassler said all three scientists will be at conferences in Texas but are planning to lead other scientists at their conferences through the process of contributing to the poem.
The Shared Sky project will be featured on April 8 when the Wick center hosts eclipse activities in the Maj Ragain Poetry Park adjacent to the center on South Willow Street on the Kent Campus.