Short Poems for Shortened Days (Twitter Haiku)

For just about every day in December, as the days got shorter and shorter, I joined a group of friends in writing poetry, mostly haiku, and sharing out via Twitter each morning. Some others wrote at their blogs and then shared the links on Twitter. I decided that I would just use Twitter, and then half-way through the month, I realized something: I was losing track of the poems. They were disappearing into the media stream.

So I set up a Storify project and began backtracking in time, gathering the poems together, and then each day afterwards, I made sure to add the new poem into the collection. Phew.

What’s interesting *and a bit frustrating* is that the haiku lining formatting gets flattened in this kind of sharing. I guess you will have envision the 5/7/5 syllables. Still, in this way, the tweets seem like another form of poetry, with words flowing across the character confines.

Thank you Mary Lee, Carol, Steve, Leigh, and Carol.

Peace (in poems),
Kevin

We Flicker, On and Off

Over at our iAnthology writing space, the writing prompt by my friend Janet this week is all about light and holidays. I wrote a poem that captures, in metaphor, how we find someone on which we can lean and find balance in the crazy days of our lives.


May you have that someone, too.

And then, another friend, Jan, wrote a lovely poem, which I was inspired to “remix” into something new. Consider it a found poem inside of a poem … on the theme of hope.

Expect Hope

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Hidden Wires (On Remembering in a Digital Age)

These Hidden Wires

I had the strange experience recently of deeply misunderstanding a situation because the interaction was online, where I misread nuances of words, and was not face-to-face, where I would have been more in tune with things. I don’t want to get into the situation itself, since it has passed and I am fine with it. In the end, I am glad that I was misunderstanding the whole thing, though.

But in my misunderstanding, I started to wonder about the act of remembering in the digital age, and how often, our worlds and daily writing become so ephemeral. Words here. Images there. Videos here. Sounds there. I’ve written along these strands before, I think, but I keep circling back around on it.

It must be important.

How do we remember where we were (and how do our loved ones find us) when what we write and share are scattered in so many online places? Maybe this is why so many people like Facebook — it’s the one-stop social space where. We trade privacy and information ownership for the known anchor point of social media.

I guess I must have been sort of on a morbid path the other day, but I realized: my wife would not likely be able to find much of what I am writing and sharing, if I were suddenly gone. Do I make a list of sites and passwords for her? Honey, here is where all of my songs are … here are my poems … these are my games …. here are my book reviews …. my videos are here and here and here …

Or my sons. They know only a bit of what I do when I am pounding away on the keyboards here. My world as teacher and artists and writer in this space intersects with my world as father at home, of course, but only at times.

Sometimes, I have this vision of my sons, years from now, deep into the future, uncovering the things I have made and created over the years, and realizing: that’s what he was doing: writing songs, writing poems, writing posts, making connections. I remember once finding a vinyl record that my father (a drummer) cut with a band, and it was a sort of powerful magic of listening to him as a musician.

What if that never happens to me and my sons? What if they never find it? What if what we create, just disappears?

We are scattered, and in danger of being lost, forever.

I don’t curate myself nearly enough. Do you?

This thinking, sparked by the misunderstanding, led me to this melody that I found myself writing when thinking of this act of “remembering” the past week. I am not much of a guitar player, as a solo guitarist, and this is where my muse took me. The haiku is part of a daily poetry that I am doing on Twitter.

Will I ever find this poem and this song again? I need to remember …

Peace (together),
Kevin

Exploring Mobile Webmaker: i am small on the screen

Merely ... A Webmaker experiment

Mozilla’s pivot to mobile makes sense from its worldwide view and mission of connecting people around the world and giving them tools to “make the web.”  Most people in global communities use mobile devices, not desktop computers.

While I personally mourn the loss of Popcorn Maker (oh, I miss it terribly, and all of its remix media possibilities) and celebrate the new and improved Thimble tool (with file uploads and multiple page possibilities), I was sort of left out the mobile app experiment because I did not have an Android phone.

Now I do (long story, another day), and I went about exploring the free Webmaker App this weekend to see what Mozilla has been up to as it focuses in on mobile technology. I know the app is only the beginning (or so I think, as it seems in beta) and it wasn’t bad.

Nothing overly impressive yet, either, as far as I can tell, but I was able to make a website poem within minutes, and once I got myself situated, I found it fairly easy to use. I could see the threshold for using this app to be very low for most people. You can make the web within minutes.

View i am small on the screen

I purposely did not include any images or graphics with my small poem, as I was trying to keep the design simple, with words and links to side stanzas broken off from the main trunk of the poem. Basically, the editing mode gives you branches to create multiple pages and buttons as links to those pages. The downside is that viewing of the finished project is best done in the app itself. On the web, the poem looks scrunched up, at best.

But maybe that claustrophobic effect is effective for a poem whose theme is the smallness of the web. I’m going to nod my head and say, that was my purpose as a writer all along. (You believe me, right?) The poem became digital within the constraints of the technology.

What will you make?

Peace (here),
Kevin

Typing with My Voice: A Poem Constructed on the Fly

(This is for Slice of Life, a writing activity hosted by Two Writing Teachers)

Using Speech to Text tool

I wanted to try out the new feature in Google Docs that allows you to speak so that the computer will type for you. (See the Google site for more information). I have to say, speech recognition has sure come a long way, and now I am wondering how I can bring this into my classroom for struggling writers once we get into our Google Apps for Education accounts this year.

The Voice tool wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for me to write this poem on the fly and then do some quick editing on it. I wrote a poem, inspired by flowers on the table. I realized later that you can add in some simple commands for line breaks and punctuation. I’ll remember that for next time.

Peace (you hear me?),
Kevin

 

Reverberation Effect: How Poetry Beats Prose as a Comment

PreciousConnections

This morning, I followed a link from my friend, Simon, to his post yesterday about connections and disconnections. As always, Simon had me thinking as I was reading and then, afterwards. I wanted to leave a thought for him at his blog, a little flag in the ground to say: I read what you wrote, and it affected me, and now my brain is thinking, wondering.

A few seconds after posting a short comment, I realized that what I really wanted to do was write a poem, that the disparities of the world that Simon wrote about — of a former student struggling to keep power, literally, flowing in order to get a message out to the world — were part of a larger issue of access and technology in the world.

So, I wrote a poem, and shared it with him. Interestingly enough, the poem moved into the opposite direction: it was a poem of relationship of connections between two people. I was working to get at the narrow vision in order to make a point about the larger concept of how we decide where we will spend our energy connecting. I didn’t realize that until I was done writing the poem.

That got me thinking: why do I so often these days take what I have read in a blog post and turn my response into a poem?

I think it points to the power of poetry to get at something deeper. Prose comments on blogs are more of a “I was here” acknowledgement — and appreciated, by the way — but poetry is a “Your words affected me deeply and inspired this.

I wish there were more poems sitting in my blog comment bin. No pressure if you are reading this (and I don’t need a deluge of poems, but dang, that would be cool). Still, it seems like the whole idea of reading and getting inspired is to take that inspiration, and move it into art of some sort, and then share it back. It creates this reverberation effect with the writer. It breaks down the walls between reader and writer.

I know many people are uncomfortable writing poems, never mind writing poems on the fly while reading blog posts, and then, to add to the pressure, posting it on a public space. It’s just one of those things that came to me as I was writing this post about Simon, creating a larger reverberation.

Maybe the ripple will allow you to float on a poem one of these days.

Peace (peacepeacepeacepeace),
Kevin

Ghost Train: A Digital Poem about a Public Space

Like perhaps many of you, we have a wonderful old railroad bed that been transformed into a highly-useable public space: our rail trail/greenway system. A few years back, I wrote about the trail for a local poetry compilation, and I thought this week in the Making Learning Connected MOOC would be a fine time to dust that poem off and make it into a digital poem.

I tried to use the lens of the camera as part of the poetry itself … not sure if it worked the way I wanted it to work …

Peace (in the past and present and future),
Kevin

A Smattering of Poems in/of Public Spaces

I seem to have left a few poems scattered here and there during the week’s exploration of public space via the Making Learning Connected MOOC, and I finally rounded up a few to pull together into a single post.  Two of the poems are about the voiceless in our spaces, and the third is the hacking of a public space for art. The notion that we are all in these spaces together becomes a theme for exploration.

AStageinMotionWhatMusicDoYouSing

WeforgottenUsclmoocdonowAnd this one I shared earlier in the week: Clmooc

 

Peace (in poems and public space),
Kevin

The Ownership of Sight Lines

Clmooc

We’re moving into a theme of “public space” in the Making Learning Connected MOOC and the invitation to create “stories and spaces” around the notion of the “public” had me thinking of a conversation I had with a neighbor about a new cell phone tower just outside our neighborhood.

Peace (in what we see and don’t),
Kevin