Category Archives: Poetry

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

Playing with Mirrors/Palindrome Poems

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The Learning Event for Walk My World this week has been “mirrors” and it had me remembering the concept of the mirror/palindrome poems, where the poem reads the same backwards and forwards. I’ve been trying my hand at them a bit.

First, I tried poems about writing and music. A key element for these poems is the use of punctuation to create pauses one way that don’t exist the other way, and the center line as a bridge between the sections.

Two Mirror Poems

Then, yesterday, I had this idea of taking the mirror image even further. I used an online site that will remix text, allowing you to create text written forward and render it backwards. I also wondered how it would sound, so I used another site that allows you to record your voice and then turns the audio in reverse.

Here is my Winter Mirror, Forward poem:
Winter Mirror, Forwards


Voice Recorder >>

Here is my Winter Mirror, Backward poem:
Winter Mirror, Backwards


Record audio or upload mp3 >>

And yes, I am sick of winter …

Peace (in the mirror),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Lifting Lines to Honor Writers

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sol15 icon

(This is a Slice of Life post. It is part of a month-long writing adventure facilitated by Two Writing Teachers. You write, too.)

Slice of Life: I Lift Lines

I’ve written about my line lifting before … of reading other people’s blog posts, and finding a phrase or line that seemed particularly interesting, and then building out a poem from it, leaving it as a comment in the blog. I hope that folks get pleasantly surprised by it. (or at least, amused.)

Yesterday morning, I wandered to a few blogs via Slice of Life that I don’t visit all that often, hoping to catch a flavor of the writer and maybe a line that I could build off (that sounds like I am using Legos for poetry, doesn’t it?). I was not disappointed, and while my own poem collection is a mixed bag (some hold up more than others), that is the nature of the quick poet at work.

You can view all of the Line Lifted Poems here as a collection on Notegraphy.

If you were one of the bloggers I visited, thank you for lending me your lines. I hope you saw my poem as a gift. I was grateful that Greg, one of the bloggers, sent me my poem back, wrapped up in a lovely PicCollage.

A Line Lifter gets his poem back
Peace (from a line lifter),
Kevin

False Horizons: A Found Poem, Remixed

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You should read Terry Elliot’s post about a chart that Audrey Watters put together about the Horizon Report and its predications for trends in EdTech over the years. Terry warns us that when an organization like Horizon makes predictions, it shapes the future. He is more deep than that, though, so give his piece a read.

This was my take on the chart (which was interesting to read):

Horizons reports
And I could not resist a meme after reading Terry’s post.
Horizons reports
But I was also struck by Terry’s heartfelt views of the impact organizations like Horizon have on policy makers, and that led to a “found poem” that I then moved into Zeega as part of my push to make Zeegas until they close up shop soon.

Peace (in the think),
Kevin

 

I Heard the Words …

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I am going to keep making Zeegas until time runs out … this one is from a poem I wrote about hearing a racist comment about a friend and the defense mechanism that kicked in.

 

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

Further Poetic Remix: Identity

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Yesterday, I shared out how I remixed Identity by Julio Noboa Polanco and made a new poem from Polanco’s words. Today, I take a step forward into remix, by using my poem and a video version of Identity, weaving them together via Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker. The result is a mix of words and images and sound.

Feel free to remix it yourself. Just hit the remix button on the Popcorn video.

Peace (in the remix of the remix),
Kevin

A Poetic Remix: Breaking Through the Surface of Stone

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In one of the learning cycles for Walk My World, we’ve been asked to read and think about two poems — Tupak Shakur’s The Rose That Grew From Concrete (actually, a song lyric, right?) and Identity by Julio Noboa Polanco. So much gets done with Tupak’s metaphor (amid some complaints that it is probably a bit too obvious), so I cast my eyes to Polanco. I have not read the Identity poem before, and thought I might try to deconstruct and then reconstruct the words into my own poetry remix. (I hope Polanco won’t mind).

I found myself focusing on some key phrases, including “breaking through the surface of stone,” which I found very evocative. Taking the words of the poem, and them moving words and phrases around, with the concept of keeping the theme intact but making it into something new, this remixed poem is what emerged for me. It’s still about identity, about being an individual, but I tightened up the stanzas and found my own voice inside Polanco’s lines. That what remix is all about …

BreakingThroughtheSurfaceofStone

And my voice:

 

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

A Poem, A Puzzle, An Act of Playfulness

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So, I had this idea … what if I wrote a poem and delivered bits and pieces of it (let’s call them stanzas, shall we?) to a few friends in online spaces and asked them to piece the poem together over social media? What would that look like? How would you even pull it off? And this began an adventure this weekend with three of my friends — Charlene, Sheri and Terry — as I launched a poem like a balloon and watched it wander off.

My goal as a writer in digital spaces was to try to figure out how to make this kind of playfulness meaningful and to extend out the poem’s life beyond me writing it and me publishing it. It helped that I know Terry, Sheri and Charlene are game for the oddness of play, as we all were deeply involved in the Making Learning Connected MOOC experience over the last two summers.

In the end, what I decided to do was make the poem a puzzle. The embedded Thinglink here is an annotated version of a flowchart that I created (first, on scrap paper, and then later, with an app) to try to show what happened to the poem and the puzzle over the weekend. The challenge for them was to find their way to the website where the entire poem was published — all four stanzas (they only each received a single stanza, in isolation).

I put the poem a link beyond a password-protected website that I set up, and their task was to coordinate together to find the code word that would unlock the website that would lead them to the poem. Along the way, they made their own poems and pictures and websites, and used a hashtag on Twitter to share (and for me to give out clues).

It was fun to watch unfold — using writing and social media as “game” for reading, listening and collaborating, and trying to coordinate it from afar took some doing. But I think a variation of this kind of activity could be used as a model for how to think of literacy in the context of social media and social gathering.

It become the poem I let loose like a balloon to the sky …

Charlene later asked, how could this translate into a classroom experience? Good question and one I am still mulling over. I suspect you could replicate it in offline space by using stanzas of poems as clues to some larger mystery that students have to collaboratively solve. Or have students create the poems that become the clues … there are possibilities.

 

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin