If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. ~ Charlie Parker
Poetry
Poem for 2 Voices: The Writer and the Mathematician
May 29th
My class is working on Poems for Two Voices this week, and our plan is to use our school’s iPod iTouches for podcasting. I’ve gone around and around on the best way to go about this, and decided that I would set up a classroom account on Cinch and have us podcast and post on there. I’ve already had to think of some workarounds, mostly because our iTouches are not the latest generation and we need to use a headphone/microphone unit for recording.
In my head, I had this great vision of two students, each with headphones, connected by a jack splitter to the iTouch, recording. Well, reality hit. The touches have an odd jack input, and my splitter that I usually use for connecting headphones won’t work. So, we are going to have sit the headphone w/microphone in front of each pair, and record like that. We’ll live with the background noise, I guess. On Tuesday, I am going to let them podcast a few of their own poems, individually, so they can get the experience of working the headphones.
To make sure the idea would work (always a good thing), I wrote a poem myself about writing and math, and asked my math teaching colleague to record it with me. He took the writing part and I took the math part, just to flip our normal roles. It sounds OK, actually.
TheWriter and the Mathematician- A Poem for 2 Voices
Peace (in the voices),
Kevin
All Poems Come to an End (for now)
May 2nd
I spent just about every morning in April writing poems. First, I would head to Bud the Teacher’s site, get inspired by the image that Bud would share, and then I would write. I’d often try to add a podcast, to give a little voice to my words, on Cinchcast, and after sharing the poem on Bud’s site, I would head over to our National Writing Project iAnthology site, for more sharing. There, we had about 20 people involved in the writing of poems. Not everyone wrote every single day, but there were a lot of poems being written, shared, talked about, and even used as inspiration for poetry responses (ie, one poem inspired another poem).
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I started to run out of poetic steam by the end of the month. I did. But I tried to write through those walls as best as I could, and while not every poem I wrote is a gem, there may be a few diamonds in the rough that could emerge as something better with a little work. My job now is go back, and see the poems through different eyes. What words are worth salvaging and refinishing?
My final poem for Bud was about coming to the end of PoemaDay.
Sometimes
I imagine my poems like leaves
falling behind with the seasons;
they burst into view
fade
fall
and become reborn again the following year
in the spring sunshine
of April
as something entirely new
Peace (in the poetry),
Kevin
Book Review: Practical Poetry (across the curriculum)
Apr 22nd
Just in time for the push of Common Core curriculum alignment by our state, and many other states, Sara Holbrook’s Practical Poetry: A Nonstandard Approach to Meeting Content-Area Standards is, well, practical and useful and full of interesting ways to merge poetry with math, science and social studies. I was lucky enough to receive this book from Lisa, thanks to a poetry contest she held at her blog (Effective Teaching Solutions), and the other night, as my son was in basketball practice, I dove in.
Holbrook is a poet who has gone into many classrooms to work with students, and her insights are valuable around the ways that poetry can engage and connect writers with various elements of curriculum, without making it boring. This is creative learning.
She notes that poetry is one of those topics that seem to be left out of discussions around curriculum change, particularly as we move into more expository writing (ie, the Common Core) and leave more narrative writing behind. But she lays out a strong case for keeping poetry alive and well in our schools.
She argues that writing poetry:
- jogs the memory
- demands keen observation
- requires precise language
- stimulates good communication skills
- encourages good organizational skills
- encourages reading fluency
- helps us learn about ourselves and our world
- is a powerful language all of its own
While she begins with a look at the Language Arts classroom, she then shifts gears into how to bring poetry ideas into math, science and social studies in meaningful ways. While she acknowledges that some might scratch their head on these connections, she patiently lays out her rationale for each subject area, gives specific lesson plans and provides many student and her own exemplars.
When it comes to math, for example, she notes that both mathematicians and poets have similar intent: “We look for patterns in the world. We attempt to find a pattern that we can apply in order to define the unknown. We first look at nature as a whole and then attempt to break it down into parts. We use symbols to represent the unknown while we are in the process of defining terms, and we use comparative techniques to communicate with one another (58).”
I love that.
In science, she does something similar, but with physics. “Poetry’s mission is to understand the universe — physics’ mission is the same. Both condition the mind to search for an answer, to stimulate imagination, to look beyond the status quo. The arts and sciences are intertwined more than either side seems to want to admit (92).”
Again, I love that.
And in the field of social studies, she notes that the lens at which we make sense of the social and political and geographical contours of our lives and the lives of others also connects with poetry.
“And nothing gets a poet’s pen twitching quite as quickly as a good controversy. At the heart of every change or conflict in the written history of the world has been some bothersome poet spouting off on one side or another. The personal quality of a poem makes all those dates and events not only more interesting but more memorable. Poems are letters and snapshots from the past – ‘original source documents’ ; they’re like reading someone else’s mail versus reading a telephone directory. And memorable is definitely an advantage when test time comes around. (128)”
Yes, she hovers around our testing society and what that often means for creative writing, and again, she strongly makes the case that poetry is another way to help students achieve on standardized testing by moving beyond the drill-kill methods. There are ways to meet curriculum standards AND still spark creativity in our students. We need to remember that.
My sixth class will soon be moving into poetry and I am going to have Holbrook’s book of ideas right on my desk. I also will be bringing it to meetings I am sure we are going to be having next year as we re-configure our district’s curriculum map to align with Common Core. I don’t want to lose poetry, and Holbrook’s Practical Poetry may help me make my case.
Peace (in the poetry),
Kevin
Making My Illuminated Text Poem
Apr 20th
(an updated version — with audio)
A Warning: An Illuminated Poem from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.
I was asked by a few people yesterday how I created the illuminated poem I shared yesterday. So, I am trying to step back a bit and reflect on how I went about it and the choices I made in the composition process. A version of this post will also be on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site.
First of all, I began my day at Bud’s site, where he had an image of warning signs and a few lines of a prompt for a poem. I also had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to explore how to do a simplified Illuminated Text project. As I mentioned yesterday, it was through some colleagues at the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site that gave some insights, some inspiration and a direction for me to proceed into this unknown terrain.
The writing came first, although I wrote the poem knowing that I would be using the text in some sort of animated project. I worried less about more poetic elements such as meter and rhyme and flow, and more about the message of the poem. The theme put forth by Bud was a warning, and I knew I wanted it to be about shaking up life to get to the things that are important. The lines came fairly easily, and I was revising them as I was creating the project. The last line was most important to me, and I changed it a few times to get it to how I wanted it.
Next, I opened up Powerpoint. I’ve done lessons around animation with Powerpoint before with my students, although it has been some time since I dabbled in there myself. I decided to use a plain white background, and to use just one single slide. This narrowed my working space and limited some choices, but that was fine. I debated the black-text on white-background, and even tried some other colors. In the end, I liked the simplicity of the design. I wish I had more time to spend with font, though. I feel as if that area of text choice might be more deliberate than I was.
I then slowly added each line of the poem as text boxes. Here, though, I made some decisions about which words should be separated from the line — which words should be their own individual block of text. The word “go” seemed to need to move, right? And I wanted to make the word “door” its own text, as if it were a doorway of sorts. The stacking idea came later, as the text became the door. I knew that later, these planned separation of text would give me more flexibility in the animation. I didn’t want too many words like this. Instead, I tried to break off pieces that had meaning on their own in the lines of the poem.
Once the words were there, then I began the rather difficult task of animating the words and lines. There were about 20 pieces of animation in the poem, and synchronizing them to work one after another, or in tandem, took some time and trial-and-error. I wish I could say that I was very, very deliberate in every movement that I chose. For some lines, I was very purposeful. The line that ends “shake it up” was a line I wanted to shake up — connecting the visual to the words. For others, I wanted it only to look good. I’m not sure why I made one line vertical, and then added multiple “open it” texts around the piece. I had some vague concept of the phrase making connections with the poem. I don’t think it worked, even though it looks cool, visually (although I should have staggered it more). In fact, not every animation here is completely in sync with the meaning of the text it animates.
More than once, I made some mistakes in the animation design and had to step back in time, and rework the sequence and flow. This is where the structural weakness of Powerpoint came into play — it is not designed for this kind of project, I concluded. The management overview of my workflow was weak. But I always like the idea of using a platform for something other than what it was designed for.
I knew I wanted to convert the Powerpoint into a video, and I have this software program that I bought a few years ago to do that. But I guess I hadn’t updated it recently, and it would only create a video with a watermark. I didn’t want that, and so I turned to the web. I found the AuthorStream site, which converts slides to video and then kicks out an embed code and hyperlink. I wasn’t happy, to be honest, because I didn’t want to the poem to be silent. But I could not find a way to add audio with the site.
Later in the day, I finally figured out how to update my Powerpoint conversion software. I took that raw video, and dumped it into MovieMaker, where I added some music from Freeplay Music. Then, I added in a narration audio track, which is what I wanted all along. I want voice in my poems. The result is pretty decent, and I could not host it myself at my Vimeo video site, which I am now doing.
Given the limits of the tools I used, I am pretty happy with the results. I think the technology helped make the poem very different than I would have been as just lines on the page. The animation, and the choice of words that get animated, and the sequencing of animation — plus the audio tracks — really make this a very different kind of poem.
Could I replicate this in the classroom? Yes. It would require time and mini-lessons around the deeper levels of Powerpoint — particularly around structuring a page of animated text (which requires organizational skills) — but on a smaller scale, this is doable. And there is no real need for the conversion to video, either. You can add audio right into Powerpoint slides and share the project out as a PP Show. The quality is not as good, in my experience, but it is workable.
What do you think?
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
Warning: An Illuminated Poem
Apr 19th
For a while now, I have been interested in the idea of “illuminated text” and how to create a project that uses this concept. Over at the NWP Digital Is site, Elyse has been offering suggestions on how one might proceed. She suggested Powerpoint might be one cheap option (and gave a link to a site with various projects that might be models), and a light went off in my head. Of course!
This morning, for Bud’s poetry prompts ( with the concept of a “warning” as the theme), I dove into Powerpoint and using just a single slide, with custom animation, created this poem. I converted it to a video online with Authorstream. I wanted to add music, but it didn’t quite work right. (And I am a little frustrated that a software program that I bought a few years ago to convert PP to video no longer seems to work right.)
So it is a silent poem.
And here is a screenshot of my Powerpoint, just to give an idea of the complexity of animation. Still, I think this could be done with students, on a smaller scale.
Peace (in the poem that moves),
Kevin
Poems All Over the Place
Apr 18th
I write poetry throughout the year, but April rolls around and suddenly I am writing every day because so many of my friends and connections are also writing poems. They inspire me. Since the start of the month, I have been writing just about every day with Bud the Teacher, who posts an image as a writing prompt. I’ve also been sharing the poems, and others, over at our iAnthology network for National Writing Project folks. And I have been dabbing with Twitter-sized poems and Prezi poems, and more. In many cases, I have also been using Cinch to podcast my poems (see my Cinch site to listen to poems)
I’m not going to say that all of the poems are very good. A few are just a possible start towards something else. A few are written, posted and then discarded (recycled?). Here, then, are a few poems from the last two weeks that I think have some legs.
First, Lisa posted a call for poems about teaching on Twitter and her blog site, and I wrote this one not long after our standardized testing. I call it “The Muted Mind” because I was trying to get inside the head of a particular student.
Second, in the iAnthology, I was having a discussion with someone about ee cummings and the off-beat style of poetry. When Bud posted an image about “play,” I decided to play with a poem myself.
This is a haiku that I wrote on the first day of April, hoping for warmer days.
Springtime whispers love
I sit here waiting for you:
a flower, blooming
One day, Bud posted an image of the Periodic Table of Elements. Here is what I came up.
Atomic Structure
electrons fuel me
as i circle around you;
where you desire equilibrium,
i desire movement;
they say i am nothing
but negative energy,
as if i am sucking the life
out of you;
they say you encompass
the positive energy,
as if that were the path
that lights the way forward;
we know better:
you are what fuels me
and I am what fuels you
and no chart on the wall will ever
uncover the magic of that.
Also on the iAnthology, a weekly writing prompt asked us to the concept of Hate with metaphor. This was difficult and I had trouble finding a way in. I decided to use Prezi again, and center my ideas around a giant version of the word Hate, and then end with a positive message.
And finally, this poem is inspired by the circular nature of math — a sort of poem that folks in on itself. It’s a Mobius Strip of words.
(start at the end)…. the particles
of the chalkdust that appear to be
rising exponentially,
mathematically creating wonders
that only imagination might otherwise
discover ….…. i arrive at the chalkboard
in order to hold you off
with your rectangular eraser
so that my calculations and your expectations
might find a way to resolve
themselves …..…. instead, the quarry of calculation eludes us,
so i stumble back through the cloud
to find my seat,
watching the sunlight from the window
reflect and refract inside … (return to the start)
What poems are you writing?
Peace (in the words),
Kevin
Giving 25-Word-Stories a Poetic Touch
Apr 3rd
I periodically jump into Twitter to write short, short stories — known by the hashtag of #25wordstories. In the past week, as poetry has been front and center, I’ve been trying to cross-pollinate the concept of 25-word-stories with a poetic theme. My aim has not been to write poetry in Twitter, which I also do from time to time, but instead, to write a story with a poetic touch or theme. Alas, some are better than others. The limits of Twitter really makes things interesting and difficult. And certainly challenging.
Here is what I have so far:
What would you write? And if you do it on Twitter, use the #25wordstory hashtag. (There is also a #poemaday hashtag for daily poetry writing and a #poetweet for folks using Twitter for writing poetry as a tweet.)
Peace (in the stories),
Kevin
What I did: I Wrote Poetry
Apr 2nd
We had one of those very odd weather days yesterday, when snow closed down my school (because of the elevation and bus routes) but not my sons’ schools. My wife was in DC, lobbying for the National Writing Project as part of the effort to restore federal funding. So, it was me and our dog for a few hours. I did chores and in-between, I wrote.
I started out with the Global Poem Project, adding a few lines to a collaborative writing project. (See more about it in my post from yesterday.)
Then, I ventured out onto Bud Hunt’s site, where he is posting an image each day and asking us to write poems inspired by the pictures. Yesterday, the prompt was about what keeps you up at night. (by the way, come join us at Bud’s site.)
Confusion
begets dreams
begets hours of wakefulness
of missed opportunities which
begets regrets
which in turn
begets confusion.
Then, I saw that one of my NWP friends, April, had written a haiku at her blog site. I was reading it — it’s about a blind date — when I realized that a good comment might be a haiku, too. So I wrote one from the other side of the story of her haiku.
nervous energy -
inside, he sees the mirror;
and combs back his hair.
I noticed another NWP friend, Andrea, had a poem, too. (She is part of a #poemaday twitter feed). Her poem was about kids and clothing and the metaphor of growing up and growing out of things. Again, I was struck by her poem and found myself writing a haiku response.
Bags of your clothing
sit ready for donation;
parting is sorrow
And then, yet another NWP friend, Joel (starting to see a connection in my network of teacher-writers?) had a great poem about April Fools and the weather, which was on my mind, too, as I looked out our window to the trees dripping with snow. He referenced the groundhog in his poem, so I thought a way to comment w0uld be a poem from the groundhog’s viewpoint.
A Groundhog’s Response
Just because I came up
doesn’t mean
I know what
I’m doing;
Sometimes, I am just
coming up for air
and sunshine.
You try living down in a hole
sometime
and see how you like it
and add to the cramped quarters
the pressure of expectations.
It’s not the shadow that scares me;
it’s you people.
Finally, I had my guitar out (dog at my feet) and was trying to work on a new song. This is what came out. I don’t necessarily feel it will go anywhere beyond this demo, but songwriting is poetry, right? I have been trying to write something about Japan — something true. But I have been failing miserably for days on it, to be honest. I can’t quite get the right song or emotion. So, this started out as a song about Japan, but veered sharply away at some point.
Lost and Found
(listen)When the shadows are falling
and the voices are calling
and the world is storm
brewing at seaWill you hold me together?
Will you offer me shelter?
Will you keep me forever
if that’s what I need?‘Cause I feel the Earth tearing apart
if you reach out your hand — I’ll give you my heart
I feel I’ve been lost
’til you found meWell, we all have this fire
this burning desire
to shed off the past
as historyBut somehow it finds us
it’s never behind us
I’m no longer the man
I used to beI refuse to allow the pain to creep in
I’m shouting out loud — please let me in
I feel I’ve been lost
’til you found me
Peace (in the writing),
Kevin
A Global Poem Project
Apr 1st
I saw this project and could not resist adding a line. It’s a Global Poem for Change Project by LitWorld, and they have started a poem with the help of poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The poem is open to the world to contribute a line, so that the poem slowly grows with each contributing poet. And the theme of peace and global change for the better is at the heart of the project.
Here’s the line that I added:
I sent my thoughts out from my heart
a small step, but it’s a start
Go ahead — you come, too. The door is open for you for a single poetic line.
Peace (in the collaboration),
Kevin
PS — here is more information:
fo
Slice of Life: Cool is the Way it Plays
Mar 27th
Last night, my wife and I went to a jazz concert that celebrated the music of John Coltrane. It featured tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson and beyond the drums was the legendary Jimmy Cobb, who has played with everyone from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis and more. He may be getting on in years but he can still kick it.
As I was listening, my mind drifted along with the music and this one line of words kept popping in my head. “Cool is the way it plays …” and this morning, I still had it there. “Cool is the way it plays ….” and as I was walking our dog, under the stars, this poem started to form for me.
I purposely tried to weave ideas in and around the lines, making an attempt to captures some of the ways I heard Javon Jackson play around with melodies and lines.
Cool is the Way it Plays
Cool
is the way it plays
on stage
the way the notes graze
against each other
in melodic memory
in harmonic time
in the rhythm of the line
is where the notes
dance
take chances, sometimes,
I’m out here alone -
in there
you’re trying to find
the hook, the head,
the crazy way I said
to listen to that sound
coming from that horn
as if it were some theme
I’d heard before
we were born
reminding us
to listen,
to listen,
to listen to the currents
weaving in and out
of each other -
Cool
is the way it plays
on stage,
Put away the rage
listen
relax
dance along the line
You can listen to the podcast version of the poem, too.
Peace (in the cool),
Kevin
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