Category Archives: Poetry

Digital Poetry becomes Digital Story

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

Slice of Life: It’s Not the End of the World (and I Feel Fine)

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(This is a Slice of Life post, in which we share out the events of the day. It has through March and but also is open for words and slices every Tuesday throughout the year, and it is facilitated by the folks atTwo Writing Teachers. You write, too, if not today, then how about next Tuesday?)

Slice of Life Writing Block

Here’s a comic I never had to use during this month of daily Slice of Life writing. I had even another comic sitting on my iPad, a Seinfeldian comic about writing nothing … just in case that day came and I had nothing to write about.

But you know, I always found something to write about, and so did dozens of other educators and writers participating in the Slice of Life. I had no interest in the various prizes for commenting and posting, but if it kept folks involved, I’m OK with that. For me, the gift was that of connections, and writing.

In a final nod to Slice of Life 2015, I went around yesterday morning and did some more of my “line lifting” — stealing lines from blog posts and then constructing short poems around them, as comments to the original bloggers. My aim, as always, was to honor the writing through some literary theft.

You can read all of the poems I made yesterday morning here.

Line Lifting Slice of Life

You know, each March, I think … maybe not this year. Maybe I won’t take part in Slice of Life. Then, I do, and I can’t even remember why I was thinking of bailing out on it. There’s something in the collective power of teachers writing, sharing and connecting … expressing the good and the bad and the serious and the funny and the moments of our lives that reverberate across time and space. The writing exposes the human nature of who we are, and so many posts move us beyond our role of teachers.

If you were a Slicer, or if you came here to comment at all, I thank you from the deep parts of my heart. If I never got to your blog to comment, I am sorry. I’m an early bird writer, so the blogs listed at Two Writing Teachers before school got my attention. Morning is my quiet writing time.

Remember: We’ve still got Tuesdays. See you on the Interwebz.

Peace (in the month gone by),
Kevin

 

Slice of Life: Mix and Remix (and Remix again?)

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(Each day in March, a whole bunch of educators are writing Slices of Life — capturing the small moments. It is facilitated by Two Writing Teachers. You write, too.)

Write, Share, Give

Sometimes, opportunity presents itself. Yesterday morning, I was checking out the Twitter hasthag for #walkmyworld (a series of media-centric activities around the theme of identity and creation — see more here) when I noticed that Shawna had posted a digital poem. Of course, I was curious. And she was looking for feedback. I went there, at her blog site, to see what she had been up to.

It was a lovely rendition of a Georgia Heard poem about school and conformity and “straight lines” that we expect our students to fall into when they come into school, instead of the crazy zig-zag of life outside of school. I’m not philosophically opposed to imposing order on the day – and plenty of kids need that consistency, given the chaos of their lives at home. But Shawna did such a nice job.

Take a look.

I left her a comment (including a request to share out the “how she did it” at her blog) and then decided to go one step further — I decided to honor her poem by remixing it, via Webmaker Popcorn Maker. If you have not used Popcorn, it allows you to layer in various media and do other interesting things with online video. The remix does not affect the original. It only borrows it. Remix is a way to honor the original, and in this case, I was hoping to add a layer of my own art to Shawn’s art.

Check it out.

And of course, one of the beauties of Popcorn is the ability to remix the remix. So, why not give it a try? You can either click on the “remix” button at the top right of my Popcorn Project, or you can just click here and get started (no account needed to play around with the remix.)

See what you can make. And then maybe write about it.

Peace (in the share),
Kevin

A Video Mirror Poem for Two Voices

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I don’t know if this worked as I wanted it to work … but I was playing with the theme of mirrors for Walk My World and wanted to write a short Poem for Two Voices, performed as a video mirror.

Here’s how I did it:

  • I wrote the poem (well, yeah). I was working on the continued theme of identity.
  • I set up my iPad video and recorded me reading the first side of the poem, with my head turned. I had some trouble reading, and finding the red “record” button. It took quite a few tries.
  • Then, I reversed myself, and read the second part of the poem. Again, red button trouble. But even more difficult was the pacing of saying the words of the poem. This second part took quite some time, as I kept stumbling into the words of the first part. I never got it perfect. Just close enough.
  • I used an app called PicPlayPost to create the video collage. I like this app for projects like this, as it allows you to mesh video and images. Here, I wanted  a simple view: the mirrored self, reading a poem together. The line down the middle of the collage worked nicely for this.
  • I posted right from the app to YouTube.

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin