This morning’s prompt at Open Write was to consider a reflection poem, inspired in part by host Dave’s powerful story of the impact of 9-11 on his family. His father was firefighter who went into the towers.
UPDATE: Later, after reading a poem and some work by my friend, Terry, and an earlier reference to his use of the AI-powered Google NotebookLM (which I had played with when it first came around), I decided to use the Notebook’s features.
First, it gathered the text and link and created an overview.
Summary
The first source is a blog post written by an English teacher named Dave Wooley, who uses poetry as a teaching tool. The post is a writing prompt for teachers and students, encouraging them to reflect on the theme of mirroring and its relationship to memory and personal experience. Wooley inspires the writing prompt by drawing on his own experiences and the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, and he even provides a poem as an example. The second source is a poem that is part of a larger conversation on the blog post, in which a teacher named Kevin reflects on a past interaction with another person, wondering if their words were clear enough to get their point across. Kevin’s poem uses the metaphor of the mirror to explore the limitations of language and the complexity of communication.
One new feature in the Notebook is the creation of a “podcast” audio (thanks, Terry!) so I uploaded my poem and Dave’s post at Open Write, and the audio is an 11-minute AI-generated conversation connecting his post and poem, his use of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, and my own poem. It’s pretty fascinating. Listen to the automated voices, and how they are conversational and emotional. There are even pauses, and more.
I like that the hosts made me a student of Dave. If only I were so lucky …
Peace (in the pondering),
Kevin