A Howl for Access: Trying to Reimagine Ginsberg’s Poetry in an OER World [1949] Members : #OER18

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One thing Allen Ginsberg would appreciate about OER is, to put it blatantly, its openness— his own poetry employs unabashed honesty in illustrating his own private life. Although Ginsberg has been dead twenty years, if he were alive today, he would have been a collaborator and have shared his own work in the spirit of OERs. In my graduate thesis, I focus on reimaging Ginsberg in his early twenties, as he was coming into his own writerly identity; subsequently, a lot of what I wanted to do falls into OER’s “5 R’s”— retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute (“Defining”). My plan was to create a digital poetry project that reused and remixed parts of Ginsberg’s original poetry, so I could turn them into faux “poetic rough drafts” that he might have experimented with.

However, reusing and remixing Ginsberg’s poetry for my poetry project proves tobe more challenging than it seems, because his poems are not public domain yet. As such, it presents a problem that I will have to work around in my project, as I now need to create “fake poems” that are acceptable and work in a more accessible creative license. For creative projects like mine, OER’s “5 R’s” are not as attainable as they can be, and prove even more so that accessibility to works is an important component to academics of any discipline. In my project, I wish to explore the experiences that would be possible if Ginsberg’s works were as public as his flavorful personal life.

Works Cited

“Defining the ‘Open’ in Open Content and Open Educational Resources.” OpenContent. Web. http://opencontent.org/definition/ Accessed 26 Nov. 2017

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