Visualizing Poetry

April may be the cruelest month, but it's also the month of poetry, and Knopf does an annual poem-a-day mailing list, which I highly recommend. Thanks to my friend Tina in Seattle, I've been on this list for the last 3 years and loved every day of April.

Nine years ago we began a Knopf tradition. To celebrate National Poetry Month, we sent a poem a day by e-mail for 30 days to anyone who asked to receive them. Now, with over 25,000 subscribers, we are proud to continue with a whole new series of daily poems. Each day during the month of April you will receive a poem from some of the best poets in the world including Mark Strand, Sharon Olds, and Laurie Sheck, as well as classics from Langston Hughes, Robert Burns and more. If you know of someone who might like to join the poem-a-day party, they may visit http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/poemaday/ to sign up.

In honor of poetry visual and written, here are some samples of Boris Muller's visualizations of poems for the annual Poetry on the Road conference in Germany.

And see the great summary of other notable vis work in Ping Mag's article on beautiful data visualizations, based around an interview with the editor of the popular Infosthetics blog. (Thanks for the pointer, MJ.)