When asked to picture creative output, how often do we default to a thing? Something that can be seen, or felt, or heard. It might be a painting or ballet, a poem or a song. But what about curation and collation, aren’t they creative acts as well? 

Back in high school and college, I took part in a steady trade of personalized mixtapes. These tapes and CDs were created to reflect certain moods, often with album “titles” and occasionally with customized artwork. The modern streaming equivalent has never seemed quite the same; they just feel like more lists on my phone.  

While scrolling through various playlists this summer, it’s obvious how much work I’ve put into various vibes, and how uniquely they represent my musical taste. One of my colleagues collects a list of the songs he encounters throughout the year. …currently the aptly-titled “2024.” At the end of the year, he makes an hour-long playlist of the songs that most resonated with him, an idea he took from another friend. I tried it too last year. It fulfilled me much more than I expected. It was fun. But also cathartic. And time consuming. Choosing the songs brought me back to previous months, and Spotify makes it easy to test your song transitions time and again.  I already have almost four hours on this year’s playlist and have been thinking since January about which songs are going to make the final cut for the revised “2024 in an Hour” I’ll create in December. What an odd – and impermanent – time capsule.

As part of our freshmen English course, that same colleague has students create their own poetry anthology. Since my graduate thesis focused on student resistance to poetry and ways to increase engagement, I love this project because it allows students to capture poetry on their terms. 

The teacher raids the library for about a hundred poetry books. These, along with those in his substantial classroom library, are piled in the center of a Harkness table for students to grab as covers or titles interest them. Each student has to choose 10 poems on their own to go with a preselected grouping of five that represent a variety of poets and styles. The goal is to create an anthology meaningful to them, with a title and page-long introduction that describes the theme holding the anthology together. For each poem, they have to write either a brief analytical or reflective response. The final copies are printed as books.

There is so much personality and care that many students put into their work, and I feel like I’ve gotten to know some of the students better as a result of the poems they’ve chosen and their reflections on them. Just look at some of these titles…

For both the playlists and poetry anthologies, it’s not just the individual pieces but how they connect to create something larger than – and separate from – the selections themselves. It’s assuredly a creative process with a product that reflects the individual creating the collection. 

In terms of librarianship, there is such importance in curation, how items in a set interplay with each other. Seeing students grapple with that creates a fascinating window I didn’t expect. And if anyone wants to join me remixing your year into a playlist, I welcome the company.