One of the things I most love about blogging is stumbling across gems that I had no idea existed. As often as not, I run into them when I”m not looking for them – when I”m researching something else. That”s the case with La Bloga, a blog maintained by RudyG, Manuel Ramos, Michael Sedano, Daniel Olivas, Gina Ruiz. I ran into them looking for more information about Trinidad Sanchez, a Latino poet who recently passed away, and stayed to read far beyond what they had to say about Trini.

La Bloga is dedicated to Chicano Literature, Chicano Writers, Chicano Fiction, News, Views and Reviews. It has been awarded Tu Ciudad Magazine”s Best Blog of 2006 award. Updated five days a week, La Bloga features news, commentary, reviews and more on Chicano writing, including poetry, as in this review posted by Gina last week of Bent to the Earth by poet Blas Manuel de Luna. She observes in that review that

Mr. De Luna is one of the most eloquent and insightful poets it”s ever been my pleasure to encounter. His writing is crisp and conveys a depth of feeling so profound and haunting that it stays long after the book is closed.
Besides the reviews of poetry, literature and fiction that you”ll find at LaBloga, you”ll find calls for submission of Latino writing, observations of life and the city, and one of the most complete lists of links to Chicano and Latina writers and poets that I have found anywhere. Even if you never read a single post written on the blog – and that would be a pity, for it is some of the most informative and entertaining that I have read anywhere – La Bloga is worth repeated visits just to pore through the list of links and find amazing poets, writers and artists who are so often overlooked. I can guarantee that I”ll be visiting again and again for just that reason. You should too.

In the United Kingdom, they take these things seriously enough that the National Health Service funds poets in residence at hospitals and clinics. They pay good money to put poetry in doctors” waiting rooms and bring poets in to work with patients undergoing traumatic illness. Poetry, they say, is therapeutic, and they are willing to put their money where their mouths – and pens – should be. In 2003, two junior doctors from the University of Birmingham decided to start project to celebrate and encourage creativity in life as a healthcare professional. Their intent in starting The Right Brain was to help nurture the right brain in doctors and health professionals who often must focus on the development of their more analytical left brain.

Here in the US, poetry in medicine still has a New Age-y feel to it, the sort of thing the government watchers would sneer – but there are inroads and progress. At Yale Medical School, for instance, medical students are required to take art appreciation classes because they”ve been shown to boost diagnostic skills. And at Notre Dame, the Humanities Department offers an 8 week course in prose and poetry popularly referred to as the Med Poets Society to doctors at the South Bend based Memorial Health System.

“If someone asks me a question about asthma, I give them an answer. I have the information and can explain it, knowing that I could hold my own,” says Dr. Gary Fromm, one of the students in the first class held in 2004. “But to talk about prose or poetry, let alone write, I felt ridiculous.”

In exploring their own writing and the works of others, say the developers of the course, doctors are confronting the emotional issues they deal with every day. It”s a departure from the typical view of surgeons and specialists as impersonal and arrogan

This is about more than a few doctors getting together to write, though. Researchers in the fields of medicine and psychology believe that developing the right brain does more than awaken empathy. Writing poetry, listening to and composing music, creating and appreciating art all expand the capacity of doctors, who are taught to think in linear terms – point A leads to point B – to make intuitive leaps, to think outside the box – in short, to become better doctors.

This is not a real post. Okay, it is but… this is a link just for fun. Because I ran across this little Cafepress store completely by accident and spent the next ten minutes grinning at the snarky little sayings on the t-shirts, notepads, mugs and more. If you write, you”ll find something you love here, trust me. If someone you love writes, you”ll find the perfect bauble to gift them with. Just a sampling of The Write Snark;s offerings:

You”re lucky my weapon of choice is a pen.

You don”t want to know where I get my ideas.

You”d make an excellent villain in my book.

My hero can kick your hero”s a**.

My fantasy is urban.

Want more? Check out the store. And while you”re at it, check out The Write Snark, blog version. Rinda Elliot started the blog as a marketing tool for her online store but, she says, it quickly grew into more. You won”t find poetry there, but you will find all sorts of fun stuff, including writting challenges, works of art and music and plenty to get your muse going. Drop by and say hi – and bring along a glass of wine or a cup of coffee to keep you company while you meander through Rinda”s collection of quirky and fun things to see, do and write about.

Billy the Blogging Poet has made my work considerably easier. His list of 100 blogging poets remains up at his blog, offering a road map to – well, 100 other blogs by poets who blog. That kept blogger Billy busy for 100 days – but it wasn”t enough for him. He”s since done two more episodes of 100 blogging poets – Episode II and the current, and he says, final episode, III.

In case you weren”t counting, that”s 300 poets who blog their poetry and their lives. Here”s a random three from the latest list:

Bittersweet: Learning to Be Me is a collection of thoughts, ramblings, poems and photo poems, updated frequently. Entrancing is the best way to describe the poetry here – quick snapshots of moments in time, like haiku without the syllable constraints.

Diana Higgins blog is a perfect example of the serendipity that happens when you start following links in other people”s blogs. I don”t know if she is one of the 300 blogs featured in the 100 blogging poets. I do know that her blog is worth visiting. Among other attractions, you”ll find her Daily Prompts, a running list of exercises, word prompts and nudges to help you get going when writers block has you stalled.

Poetic Justice is a blog of political poetry – don”t cringe. There is a great deal to admire and enjoy here. Many of the poems are inspired by headlines, quotes and photographs about the war, and they hit the heart hard. Read – and keep the blog”s tagline in mind: Don”t Burn the Flag. Wash It.

Double-scoop on the great poetry places on the web this week. Rick Lupert has been hosting one of the longest running poetry readings in the LA area since 1994 (That would be the Cobalt Cafe for those of you close enough to drop in on a Tuesday night), and building and maintaining the Poetry Superhighway since 1997. PSH is one of the first poetry sites that I remember on the web – and I”ve been online reading and writing poetry in one venue or another since about 1994 myself. In those years, Rick has grown the Poetry Superhighway into a resource that links poets to each other beyond even the borders of cyberspace.

The site itself is bare bones and spare looking – no fancy flash animations, no fancy-shmancy sidebars. What there is is lots and lots of poetry – and lots and lots of ways for poets to connect with one another. Which makes sense, given that the mission of the Poetry Superhighway is …

to expose as many people to as many other people”s poetry as possible.

And Rick Lupert has come up with some novel and fun ways to do that. Take, for instance, the Poetry Superhighway”s annual Great Poetry Exchange. Once a year, Rick puts out the call for poets to ante up one copy of their books of poetry and promise to send it to one other poet in exchange for getting one book of poetry sent to them by one other random poet. Once the deadline for expressing interest in participating is past, Rick personally contacts each poet with the contact details of the poet to whom they should send their book. That”s it. It”s that simple – and that simply brilliant. This year, 137 poets will be sending their books to another poet. Most people aren”t even aware that there are 137 poets out there with their own books — but Rick is getting them to exchange poetry and get to know each other.

If ONE book of poetry isn”t enough for you, you can start marking off the days to the next Great Poetry E-Book Free-for-All… another of PSH”s brilliantly simple ideas to get people reading each others” poetry. Throughout April of this year, PSH collected e-books from poets and writers who wanted to take part in the biggest poetry ebook giveaway to date. On May 1, those 75 ebooks were available for download free to anyone in the world. No catches, no limits – except your bandwidth. Any person in the world was free to download as many of the 75 poetry books as they wanted.

Those are just a few of the projects that PSH has started in the past 9 years, most of them still active and ongoing. Those are in addition to the hundreds of links to individual poets” pages, the years of archived poetry, the weekly Poet of the Week and the annual Poetry Superhighway Contest. You can submit your poetry for consideration, read others or look at pictures of Rick and his wife (and their new house and one year old garden) at Poetry Superhighway. Everyone is welcome. Step off the road for a while and relax on the superhighway.