Digital Poetry: What Happened Here?

digipoetry2015

It’s quite likely I won’t do justice to my thinking but if we consider blogs as a space for reflective practice, then bear with me … I am going to try to think aloud as a writer about my latest project to take a place-based poem about walking to an isolated beach in Maine from here:

Poem draft 1

to here:

AWalktotheBeach

and then beyond, to here:

walktothebeach

And also into all the strange spaces in-between … and more importantly, I want think about what we mean when we say Digital Poetry or Digital Composition, and what do digital opportunities do to the ways we compose. This is not a throw-away question. Our students are writing all the time, and doing so in interesting ways outside of school. We don’t often think of it as “writing” because it falls outside our traditional, constrained definitions of what writing is.

But they are composing with video. They are composing with video games. They are composing with mixtapes, with memes, with image altering apps. They are composing with online comics, with remixing, with screencasting. They are pushing writing beyond the paper and pen.

If our students are pushing up against the edges of composition, we should be pushing edges, too. Or at least, that’s my view. If we want to be their guide into the way people compose, we need to be writing in different spaces ourselves, experimenting with writing, and discovering the learning possibilities. This is one of those experiences you really can’t view from afar, and judge the merits of. You have to dig in and do it. You need to write digitally.

This comes with a boatload of questions that orbit around a single idea: What is digital writing? I don’t quite know, and I’ve been thinking and tinkering with it for years. There was a question early on in my poetry project in which I shared two visual versions of a draft, and someone asked (quite rightly and quite politely), Why is THAT digital writing? I made a weak argument (as I now think of it) that the two images actually framed the same words in a different light, bringing to the surface a new way to look at written words of the page. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.

It was only when I got past my rough draft stage (that first image above) and final draft stage (that second image above) that I began to delve deeper into digital poetry and its possibilities. Here in this stage, I argue, the digital aspects “transformed” the poem in new ways. By using the same poem as my anchor text, the use of various digital tools and apps and spaces allowed me to make something new — with echoes of the original always intact — and provide another road into understanding what writing is and is becoming.

This inquiry is goes to the heart of digital writing. It’s not just taking something and keeping it the same with bells and whistles so that it “looks” shiny and new. Digital writing should alter our perceptions of the text, both as the reader AND as the writer. This two-sided coin is important, as we want to think of how our writing changes just as much as the reading experience changes.

So, for me, when I created a Soundscape story with no words at all in the file, yet words imposed as floating comments; or made a digital story, juxtaposing text and narration with image and music; or when I reframed the words of the poem as art; or when I found a new poem inside the old poem and asked the reader to click the button that dropped words out of sight — these were all decisions that I made to make something new (or at least, attempt to do so).

If you buy my argument (and you may not), then what are the implications for the classroom?

For me, this kind of experimenting — of taking a poem for a walk — allows me to experience possibilities for my students as writers/composers. I am my own guinea pig. I can see that the remixing with Thimble would take time and lessons around coding. I can see that the digital story app would be great to use (if we had iPads). I can see that the site that allowed me to twist words into a shape … we can do that. Using Notegraphy app for a polished-looking final copy? Yep. Introducing soundstories and podcasting? We’ll be there soon enough.

And here, I have my own mentor text to show students (who saw me writing the first draft with them and who have seen the final version that I shared the following day but have not yet been shown the extended remixes). Digital writing not only transforms my own writing process, but it also has the potential to transform my teaching practice as well. The hope is that it may transform my young writers, too.

Thanks for coming along with me on this journey of poetry and reflection. I’d love to know your thoughts on what digital writing is, and isn’t. It’s a term still very much in flux.

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Digital Poetry: An Ocean of Words

This is the final iteration on a theme — the final riff on a single poem over almost 10 days time. I’ll do some reflecting later (and I have been curating my poem’s development) … but for this last sharing out of my poem about a walk through the woods to get to the ocean in Maine, I used a few word cloud-ish techniques.

The first two, via apps on my iPad, become merely word clusters. Interesting to look at and certainly pretty to see, I guess, but not much agency in the creative element. I tried to add an invisible ocean wave to the second one (see it?) but it didn’t work the way I had hoped.

This one uses an app called CloudArt, sort of like Wordle for the mobile device.

Walk to the beach

and this one uses an app called Visual Poetry.

Walk to the beach

The second project, which uses an online program called Visual Poetry (not to be confused with the app of the same name) is a bit different, as it allows you to drag words into shapes across the screen, and so I decided that a winding path leading towards the ocean made sense. It’s very visual. The colors looked more vibrant at the site and sort of got flattened when I created the image file. Interesting.

walktothebeach

Peace (in the words),
Kevin

 

Digital Poetry: A Poem Under Remix

Here I am, still working with a single poem, from draft to finish and beyond. This is not how I usually write. I am a quick, “I am done” kind of writer, who moves on to new things once the last thing is completed. I don’t suffer from attention deficit (I don’t think) but I am always in search of the next writing piece that will kick in that moment of creative excitement.

Working on the same poem for days on end … not my cup of tea. I am a little tired of this walk through the woods to get to the beach …

But here I am, moving into a remix stage of my piece about walking through the woods on the way to the ocean, a poem of place about Maine. I want to share two versions here, both of which use Webmaker’s Thimble site, and both are a little different in nature and experience.

Walk to the Beach remix

First, this remixed poem layers the text into four stanzas, with images for each stanza that shift when you hover the mouse over them. It’s not that dramatic a remix, to be frank, but I love the look and feel of this (which I remixed from a former poem from last year, which used a template that I remixed ….)

Head to the poem

Walk to the Beach remix

Second, I was thinking about how I could use the Blackout Poem idea (of using a sharpie to remove words from a text, leaving only a poem) and I wanted to do it with Thimble. I remixed yet another remix poem, in which the push of the button “drops” text out of view, leaving designated words behind. In this case, I tried to make a new poem living inside of the old poem.

(Note: This worked fine for me in Firefox but not in Chrome or Safari. Sorry. It has to do with the javascript being used in the code, I think.)

 Head to the poem

Peace (in the remix),
Kevin

Digital Poetry becomes Digital Story

My iteration or riffing on a single poem continues as I took my poem and created a digital story with it via Adobe’s Voice app, which continues to impress me with its simplicity of use. The images all came from Voice’s internal/external search function. I toyed with the idea of not including text of the poem, but then decided to keep it in as a visual cue. I’m still not sure if that was the best decision for a digital story, driven by voice (pun not intended but appreciated).

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Digital Poetry: A Soundscape Poem

digipoetry2015

If you have been reading what I have been up to the last few days, I have been working out a poem, from draft to beyond, and this morning, I want to share a “soundscape” version of my poem. I used Freesound Music to gather up sounds of a walk to a beach, and then used Audacity to stitch them all together.

Take a listen:

Now, if you go directly to Soundcloud, you can see a little better how I layered the words of the poem into the audio file, so that as you listen, the poem comes forth as a comment overlay to the soundscape. Here is a push into digital poetry, where words and audio move into each other, making the poetic experience for both the reader/listener and the writer/composer something a bit different.

I hope you enjoy the poem as soundscape …

Peace (listen),
Kevin

Digital Poetry: A Walk to the Beach

digipoetry2015

I’ve been working on a poem of place over the last few days and while the final pieces are coming into place enough to share it, I also know I have some other ideas for what I want to do with the poem to move it more into digital poetry. This is what I have right now:

AWalktotheBeach

As part of this exploration of the digital, I have been working on the draft in TitanPad, which allows you to use a “time slider” effect to show the process of writing over time. (I think you can now do this in Google Docs … anyone know if that is right and how it is done?)

Check out the time slider of my writing of the poem. 

Writing a Poem in Motion

I will share out more of the poem’s iterations in the next few days, I hope ….

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

 

Digital Poetry: Talking Through the Lines

digipoetry2015

I’ve been interested in taking a poem through the stages with digital tools as part of Digital Poetry Month. Yesterday, I shared out the handwritten draft (raising the question of why that might be digital poetry … even with my use of contrasting images of the draft … perhaps more reflection on what I think digital writing is comes later).
Today, I want to share out some of my thinking as I was writing the poem — what the arrows and lines all mean. I did this video annotating via Voicethread. While I have the media embedded down below, it works better with the link because the file opens up into a full-screen viewing format. You can leave comments at the Voicethread, too, if you want (although you will need a Voicethread account).

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Digital Poetry: The Start of a Draft

I’ve been writing a place-based poem along with my students. It’s still in progress but in the spirit of Digital Poetry month, I thought it might be interesting to share out what the draft looks like. It’s a mess, as my drafts always are.

Poem draft 1

I took an image of the draft and then used an app to mess with the look of it, with some reverse imaging. It’s interesting how the visual impacts the feel of the writing. The poem seemed to get darker for me as I looked at it this way, the scribbles and lines more ominous.

Poem draft

My aim is to work on the poem over the next few days, thinking of how the digital aspect might inform or play into the act of writing poetry. A bunch of us are sharing digital poetry via Twitter with the hashtag #digipoetry. You are invited, too, of course.

Peace (in the emerging poem of place),
Kevin

Digital Poetry: The Wind Chimes/The Poem Unfurls

It’s April. Time for some poetry.

digipoetry2015
(icon pulled into shape by Leigh Anne Eck — @teacher4)

I do write poetry all year (why wait until April?) but it’s nice to be part of a gathering of other teacher-writers who intend to try their hand at digital poetry all month. It is always interesting to consider: What does technology do to our writing process? How does it shape what we write? How does it change the way we compose? Or does it?

I’ll see what unfolds from my end, but I wanted to start out the month on right foot …. I used a music app called Musyc to make the soundtrack here, and then used the soundtrack as inspiration for the poem (as opposed to the other way around).

Musyc works by dropping shapes onto a canvas. Each shape has a sound. Sounds bump into each other. It’s neat. I used to be able to share out the video of the music, but the app seems to be having difficulties with that option right now, so I took the audio out and layered it into Audacity with my reading of the poem.

Here is what I saw as I was making the song:
A wind chimes