Words Upon the Wall: A Gift of Song

For everyone who is in all of my various online networks and communities and adventures, I thank you. Here is a song, with some animated words, as my humble thanks for all the inspiration and support you give me throughout the year as I write and explore and learn.

Peace (with words on the wall),
Kevin

Curation Collection: Where I Walked in #Walkmyworld

One of our final tasks for the #walkmyworld project is to curate our work, using Storify. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would, but having it all in one place makes a lot of sense. Here is a bit of where I walked. I decided to curate around themes, not around time (taking a cue from Luke’s Storify for Digital Learning Day).

You can go directly to my Storify

Or view it as embedded here:

Peace (in the walk),
Kevin

When #walkmyworld met #sol14 (poetry ensues)

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(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)

 

Yesterday, I found my writing brain toggling between a new poetry writing event with the #walkmyworld project and thinking about Slice of Life, so just like that famous commercial where my peanut butter met your chocolate, I realize that today’s post is bit about both.

For #walkmyworld, the latest event idea is to write and share a Twitter-friendly poem about place. Greg and Ian suggest Haiku as one form whose brevity fits in nicely. Before school, as I was sitting on the couch with my youngest son, reading, we looked out the window. A little bird flew in and on the single branch of a bush right outside our window, it just balanced there, looking in as we were looking out.

That’s a haiku moment, if ever there was one, and I wrote it on the drive into school (repeating it over and over in hopes I would not forget the rhythm). I then used Vocaroo to record a quick podcast and then shared the poem on Twitter with the #walkmyworld hashtag. Then, later in the day, I saw someone was using Haiku Deck for sharing out some poems, and I thought: of course.


Voice Recorder >>

This morning, I moved the poem into Haiku Deck to make the piece more visual.


Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

Last night, I started to think of another poem, and how to visually represent it. Night was falling and the white snow was fading away. The stars were already coming out, and yes, it is bitterly cold here in New England (although, thankfully, we were spared the latest storm in my neck of the woods). The poem that emerged tried to capture that, and then I used an app that I have to create this visual poetic collage:
Dim the stars

Peace (in the poems),
Kevin

20 Steps Around the School


Yesterday’s Daily Create was to create a “20 Steps” video — in which you record your location, take 20 steps, record your location, take 20 steps …. 20 times. I walked around my school yesterday morning, using a shot of my feet as an anchor for my shots. As I noted on Twitter, this sort of video fits nicely with the #walkmyworld project, too.

Peace (in the documentation),
Kevin

Walk My World Interactive Text

Walkmyworld IF Map
I’ve been trying to stretch the ideas of “walking my world” with different media, as part of the #walkmyworld project, mostly in hopes that others in the venture (connected through Twitter, mostly, and through Ian and Greg’s posts) might also move beyond the sharing of images and into the sharing of ideas with poetry, writing and other forms of media.

Here’s another way. I am diving back into Interactive Fiction, mostly because in the coming weeks or so, I will having my students reading and making interactive texts. We use a free program called Twine, and so yesterday,  I went into Twine to craft this text about walking our worlds. I then host the stories in Google Drive. The image above is the story map that is created: notice all the connections and the nodes of story. The challenge is to make it all connect in a meaningful way.

There are also two design choices in Twine. I chose one in which the story unfolds on a single page, but I am uncertain if the other choice — where each link brings you to an individual page — might be better. It’s something I am still mulling over. I might share out the other version some other day.

Head to the story itself and play around with it.

Notice how I tried to use small poems as part of the overall story, and make the choices along lines of thinking. Or at least, that’s what I was trying to do. Come walk the world.

Peace (in the IF),
Kevin

Trading Fours on Poetry Genius

Trading Fours

I popped my prose poem from the other day — Trading Fours on the Seventh Night — into Poetry Genius, which allows for some neat annotating of poems (it is part of a larger system that includes the controversial Rap Genius, which has been taken to task over copyright issues for lyrics). What the site allowed me to do was connect my poem with the podcast, as well as annotate with embedded videos of the jazz musicians referenced in the poem.

Check it out and feel free to annotate the poem yourself.

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Inspired by Hass: Trading Fours on the Seventh Night

We’re examining Robert Hass‘s poem, The Seventh Night, for #walkmyworld this week. I was not familiar with the poem (actually, I was not familiar with any of his poems) so I dove into it cold. We’re using Poetry Genius to annotate the poem, if you want to come along. As I listened to Hass, and read the poem, I realized that the playful bantering reminded me of “trading fours” in jazz, where soloists exchange melodies back and forth. Sort of like a poetry slam, with music.

That led to me writing this prose poem this morning:

Trading Fours on the Seventh Night
(hat nod to Robert Hass)

The bar fell silent, watching. All eyes staring. They locked gaze together, swaying in time to the beat of the drums and the bass pounding out on the wood floor beneath their feet so that every thump traveled up their spines, every pluck of the fat string by fat fingers reached into the base of the neck. The pianist tickled out the faint melody of a tune. The stage was set. She raised up her horn. Started to call him out. Eyes closed, dancing with the muse. He admired the way her fingers flew over the keys, the bell of the trumpet suddenly alive with faint echoes of Armstrong and Morgan and Gillespie, before setting down into the cool of Baker as if someone had poured the room a scotch, neat, unhurried. He angled his mind then, catching one of her melodies in his ear and leaping in with it, knowing that once the first note was out, it would be instinct alone and nothing else to guide him. He folded himself up in her song as she watched him, smiling at the way Young and Rollins and Getz uncurled in syncopation, first from the reed in his mouthpiece, then from the caress of keys, then from the open bell on the roof of the saxophone where, finally, at last, Hawkins rolled out to take a drink with them, too. She poured that glass herself with an old line from Davis, sliding the whiskey back across the stage, where he added the ice with Coltrane. As if. And so it went, into the night with not a word spoken between them as they bantered about with metaphors rooted in the past yet slinking towards some symmetry neither one could understand nor comprehend, inventing a language all of their own on this Sunday night, this seventh night, this day of rest. Even after the crowd got antsy. Even after the band got tired. Even after the owner got so fed up that he yelled at them to stop, for God’s sake, just stop. Even after they had begun packing their horns away, there they stood, he and she trading fours until the owner turned off the lights and everyone went home but them.

Peace (on the imaginary stage),
Kevin

Write Yourselves into a Poem: A #Walkmyworld Call to Writing

Reflections from Week Five of the #WALKMYWORLD Project

I may be wrong but it seems like we are at an important juncture in the #walkmyworld project, where the shift from documenting and sharing our worlds towards reflecting through poetry hopefully will begin. I’m not sure how ready people are, though, as that leap from putting the lens on things around us (we can be removed from the action, somewhat) to putting the lens on thoughts inside of us (poetry comes from the heart) can be difficult for many, and sharing in a public space … even more so. It brings up the uncertainty that many have of themselves as writers. Yet, if the project is to be more than just documenting,  more than something than just another cute hashtag on Twitter, then I think we’ll all have to move forward, with Ian and Greg and others nudging us.

Upon reading Ian’s reflections this morning, his urging of us to become more collaborative and connected with others in the #walkmyworld spaces had me mulling over how I might write a poem inspired by the tweets in the #walkmyworld hashtag, and maybe use a poem to encourage/invite/cajole others to begin some poetry themselves. My aim is to bring people into the poem itself as way to encourage them to write their own. I humbly “borrowed” tweets from the #walkmyworld stream, finding inspiration within the confines of 140 characters. If you are in my poem, I thank you for your words and ideas.

Here’s what I composed:

 

Write Yourselves into a Poem

Over coffee …

my fingers flutter over the footsteps
of those who would
#walkmyworld with me in these
virtual spaces:

Cassandra, in backwards visual motion
bringing us out and then in again
towards faith;

Jason, with flames firing
out the center of his plate,
an extra helping of warmth in winter;

Kristen, her camera obscured,
capturing the days of others
unfolding as private moments in public spaces;

Ken, in negotiations with the unseen,
a call for action and a slow halt
to the falling sky debris that clutters our days;

Laura, on the inside looking out,
shadows falling against window panes
a lone green sentry standing guard in paradise;

Aubri, with blankets and family
and food and the screen as some beacon
of entertainment escape from the snow;

Julie, pondering her flexible role
as teacher, mother, writer, blogger
in this navigational spaces that don’t quite exist;

Antwon, deep in thought as his mind
runs along the texts of the page
even as the camera finds him in quiet repose;

and Kelly, raising her glass in a toast
to us all, to the world on which we
find ourselves walking thanks to

Ian and Greg and others who have pulled in Haas
as a mean to find words, and rhythm, to express
the everyday magic of the objects of our lives

so go on, write yourselves into a poem
sneak inside a corner of this page
and make yourselves at home …

We #walkmyworld together

Write your poem, if you can.

Peace (in the walking of the world),
Kevin

 

Inspired by Haas: I Remember the Hummingbird

The shift within the #walkmyworld centers around poet Robert Haas, and his collection of poems known as Field Notes. Greg, one of the organizers, asks us to consider one of three Haas poems, and examine it. So I chose Letter to a Poet, and I enjoyed the imagery of the mockingbird and the “mimic world” of poetry. This phrase stuck me with long after I had finished the poem and then I began to write, too.

I began to rework Haas’ poem for my own devices. As I read the piece a few times, I came to understand a sense of place and a sense of sensory images. And the bird stuck with me. That mockingbird. And thinking of birds reminded me of the hummingbird who floats into our lives each summer, hovering outside our window near the honeysuckle. I wrote my poem with Haas on my shoulder, stealing some of his rhythm and structure at times and abandoning it at others. Our meanings diverged, too, but that’s OK.

The result is this multimodal poem: I Remember the Hummingbird

Using Zeega to construct this kind of media poem is intriguing because it is all about choices and yet, those choices are limited by the reach of the Zeega database. I struggled to not overwhelm with images and movement, and yet, I wanted faint echoes of the hummingbird in most of the pages. Also, finding a song that complemented the text and images was tricky — again, how well will it mesh? — but I think this version of a song called Hummingbird made sense to me with its picking guitar parts and haunting vocals that move in to the frame.

Peace (in remembering),
Kevin

#Walkmyworld Kinetic Poetry: I Walk with Wonder

footsteps poem before
A shift is underway in the #Walkmyworld Project towards using our documentation of our world as the kernal of digital poetry. I took a shot of footprints from our back yard and wrote a poem, and then decided to try my hand at kinetic poetry (where the words/type can move). These two screenshots show the “before” and the “after” of the poem as it is played.
footsteps poem after

To really experience the poem. you’ll have to go to the poem itself. I constructed it as a remix with Thimble, part of the Mozilla Webmaker suite of free tools. This kinetic text template was shared out a few months ago by some National Writing Project friends as part of MozFest in England. It allows you to really tinker with words and learn a bit about code, too. I was aiming to make words and phrases “do something” that connected to the flow of the meaning of the words and phrases. So, the word “fall” falls, and the “footsteps” grows and shrinks like a footstep walking and “shimmers” shimmers.

Check out the poem (and use the remix button at the top right to make your own)

I Walk with Wonder by Dogtrax
Peace (in the walk),
Kevin