I’ve been thinking about how to best share out our #11poem project. Of course, yesterday, I shared out the full podcast, with all of voices together into a one file. But I still think there should be something more — something that has us all together and yet, separate, too.
So, I thought: what about a clickable image? I went to ThingLink and did just that.
Peace (in the poem),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
Yesterday, I found my writing brain toggling between a new poetry writing event with the #walkmyworld project and thinking about Slice of Life, so just like that famous commercial where my peanut butter met your chocolate, I realize that today’s post is bit about both.
For #walkmyworld, the latest event idea is to write and share a Twitter-friendly poem about place. Greg and Ian suggest Haiku as one form whose brevity fits in nicely. Before school, as I was sitting on the couch with my youngest son, reading, we looked out the window. A little bird flew in and on the single branch of a bush right outside our window, it just balanced there, looking in as we were looking out.
That’s a haiku moment, if ever there was one, and I wrote it on the drive into school (repeating it over and over in hopes I would not forget the rhythm). I then used Vocaroo to record a quick podcast and then shared the poem on Twitter with the #walkmyworld hashtag. Then, later in the day, I saw someone was using Haiku Deck for sharing out some poems, and I thought: of course.
This morning, I moved the poem into Haiku Deck to make the piece more visual.
Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app
Last night, I started to think of another poem, and how to visually represent it. Night was falling and the white snow was fading away. The stars were already coming out, and yes, it is bitterly cold here in New England (although, thankfully, we were spared the latest storm in my neck of the woods). The poem that emerged tried to capture that, and then I used an app that I have to create this visual poetic collage:
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
Yesterday, I was collecting voices from across the world. Collecting and collating voices. It was all part of an impromptu digital adventure that emerged from a P2PU Course called Rhizomatic Learning. The course ended but our inquiry has not, and so when one of the participants began to write a style of poem that has 11 words on Twitter based on days of the week, I had this idea: what if each day, more and more people wrote and podcasted and shared poems from the week? And what if we pulled them all together?
That was my job, and so yesterday, I was using Audacity to string together more than 30 audio files of podcasts from folks from all geographical spaces around the globe but whose footprints are all over my #11poem Twitter hashtag feed: Ron, Marianna, Tanya, Nick, Simon, Terry and Estelle. They generously lent me their words and their voices, and I stitched us together into this single podcast.
Listen to it. Every time I do, I am amazed at how it blends and flows, and how the digital composing transforms each of our single poems into something larger and incredibly amazing. The shortness of the poetic style, the common themes, and the use of voice … even after listening to it many times as I was editing it together, I still find it amazing to hear.
I’m still thinking about where we go from here. It feels as if there is something else that needs to happen with the collective podcast of poems, but I am not sure yet what that is. I’ll share out some of our resources tomorrow, and there will be an invite for you to remix us. For now, I invite you to listen to the voices.
And write your own poem. You’re invited.
Here is a visual collection of my poems from the week:
Peace (in the poetry),
Kevin
I am still working on writing a #11poem every day for each day of the week as part of a collaborative offshoot of the #rhizo14 community, and I am working to gather all of our poems together as an audio poetic pyramid in the coming days.
Here is what Sunday looks like from my poetic stance:
Here’s what Sunday sounds like:
And here is my visual of how the poetic pyramid is coming together, as more people joined us every day.
Peace (in the poems),
Kevin
I’m having some fun with a form of poetry shared by a friend (Ron) via Twitter. It’s an eleven word poem, so I created the #11poem hashtag and we have both been writing and sharing a poem for every day of the week (since Monday.) Here is what I wrote this morning:
The poem is in Notegraphy, which gives words a nice visual space in which to hang out.
The form of the #11poem is simple and according to Ron, it has roots in Dutch literary origins:
One word
Two words
Three words
Four words
One word
And we are both podcasting, too, in hopes that we will combine voices (with others, we hope) later on.
Peace (in the poem),
Kevin
The other day, Tanya posted a poem as part of her Rhizomatic Learning inquiry. Entitled Agree/Disagree, the poem explored some of the dichotomies of learning. Tanya’s post itself, including the poem, is a real thoughtful look at what she has been pondering when it comes to online learning spaces, and I felt inspired by leave her a poem as a comment, referencing some of the phrases in her original poem.
What kind of mailman puts your letters
in the tree?
I wondered as I stared up at the blue sky
of the sea
thinking again about how you communicate
here with me
across these spaces; such silent faces,
we rarely see
finding threads that we bind together
in community
while down here on the ground we spread
rhizomatic seeds
I also used Vocaroo to leave my poem for her as a podcast, and suggested that she podcast her poem, too.
I often suggest that folks podcast small pieces of writing. Poetry works best, I think. For me, the words get transformed when I can hear the voice of the writer — the inflections, the phrasings, the timbre. I can’t say that many folks take me up on the offer, but Tanya did, although she used the opportunity to ponder more about podcasting.
What I found interesting is her observation about voice and reading, and how, for her, the listening might impinge up her enjoyment or understanding of a text. That words on paper, or screen, give her more agency. That in the silence of physical voice, the voice of the writer comes through even clearer. (I am now making assumptions about what she was saying but her thoughts sparked some interesting questions in my head).
Tanya’s insights and comments reminded me of a recent “album” by Beck (who has a fantastic new album coming out, by the way). Instead of recording his music and releasing it as musical files, he published it via McSweeney’s as a collection of sheet music. Manuscript files. Silent notes on the page. He wanted others to the ones making the music as they saw it, and not be influenced by his sounds. Thus, Song Reader. Tell me that isn’t cool? Lots of folks did record his songs, as featured on Beck’s Song Reader site.
Which brings me back to our poems. Tanya’s and mine. As I listened to her podcast, which ends with her reading her poem, I realized that I could not let her voice just dangle in the air. Knowing she would not mind, I grabbed her audio file and together with my own poem file, I began a remix of our poems, weaving stanzas of her in with stanzas of mine.
The result? A shared poem.
I then put out a call to others via Twitter, asking who might take the shared file a step further, adding perhaps a visual element. Mariana heeded the call, and proceeded to create this:
Would this have been the same if I had put her words and my words together on the static page? No. I don’t think so. It was her voice and my voice, and later Mariana’s images, that transformed our work together, and made it something very different than the words on the page. Would it have worked as a poem on the page? Yes. Just not in the same way.
Our voices are powerful means of communication, and we don’t use them nearly enough.
Peace (in the thinking),
Kevin
I popped my prose poem from the other day — Trading Fours on the Seventh Night — into Poetry Genius, which allows for some neat annotating of poems (it is part of a larger system that includes the controversial Rap Genius, which has been taken to task over copyright issues for lyrics). What the site allowed me to do was connect my poem with the podcast, as well as annotate with embedded videos of the jazz musicians referenced in the poem.
Peace (in the poem),
Kevin
We’re examining Robert Hass‘s poem, The Seventh Night, for #walkmyworld this week. I was not familiar with the poem (actually, I was not familiar with any of his poems) so I dove into it cold. We’re using Poetry Genius to annotate the poem, if you want to come along. As I listened to Hass, and read the poem, I realized that the playful bantering reminded me of “trading fours” in jazz, where soloists exchange melodies back and forth. Sort of like a poetry slam, with music.
That led to me writing this prose poem this morning:
Trading Fours on the Seventh Night
(hat nod to Robert Hass)The bar fell silent, watching. All eyes staring. They locked gaze together, swaying in time to the beat of the drums and the bass pounding out on the wood floor beneath their feet so that every thump traveled up their spines, every pluck of the fat string by fat fingers reached into the base of the neck. The pianist tickled out the faint melody of a tune. The stage was set. She raised up her horn. Started to call him out. Eyes closed, dancing with the muse. He admired the way her fingers flew over the keys, the bell of the trumpet suddenly alive with faint echoes of Armstrong and Morgan and Gillespie, before setting down into the cool of Baker as if someone had poured the room a scotch, neat, unhurried. He angled his mind then, catching one of her melodies in his ear and leaping in with it, knowing that once the first note was out, it would be instinct alone and nothing else to guide him. He folded himself up in her song as she watched him, smiling at the way Young and Rollins and Getz uncurled in syncopation, first from the reed in his mouthpiece, then from the caress of keys, then from the open bell on the roof of the saxophone where, finally, at last, Hawkins rolled out to take a drink with them, too. She poured that glass herself with an old line from Davis, sliding the whiskey back across the stage, where he added the ice with Coltrane. As if. And so it went, into the night with not a word spoken between them as they bantered about with metaphors rooted in the past yet slinking towards some symmetry neither one could understand nor comprehend, inventing a language all of their own on this Sunday night, this seventh night, this day of rest. Even after the crowd got antsy. Even after the band got tired. Even after the owner got so fed up that he yelled at them to stop, for God’s sake, just stop. Even after they had begun packing their horns away, there they stood, he and she trading fours until the owner turned off the lights and everyone went home but them.
Peace (on the imaginary stage),
Kevin
The shift within the #walkmyworld centers around poet Robert Haas, and his collection of poems known as Field Notes. Greg, one of the organizers, asks us to consider one of three Haas poems, and examine it. So I chose Letter to a Poet, and I enjoyed the imagery of the mockingbird and the “mimic world” of poetry. This phrase stuck me with long after I had finished the poem and then I began to write, too.
I began to rework Haas’ poem for my own devices. As I read the piece a few times, I came to understand a sense of place and a sense of sensory images. And the bird stuck with me. That mockingbird. And thinking of birds reminded me of the hummingbird who floats into our lives each summer, hovering outside our window near the honeysuckle. I wrote my poem with Haas on my shoulder, stealing some of his rhythm and structure at times and abandoning it at others. Our meanings diverged, too, but that’s OK.
The result is this multimodal poem: I Remember the Hummingbird
Using Zeega to construct this kind of media poem is intriguing because it is all about choices and yet, those choices are limited by the reach of the Zeega database. I struggled to not overwhelm with images and movement, and yet, I wanted faint echoes of the hummingbird in most of the pages. Also, finding a song that complemented the text and images was tricky — again, how well will it mesh? — but I think this version of a song called Hummingbird made sense to me with its picking guitar parts and haunting vocals that move in to the frame.
Peace (in remembering),
Kevin
A shift is underway in the #Walkmyworld Project towards using our documentation of our world as the kernal of digital poetry. I took a shot of footprints from our back yard and wrote a poem, and then decided to try my hand at kinetic poetry (where the words/type can move). These two screenshots show the “before” and the “after” of the poem as it is played.
To really experience the poem. you’ll have to go to the poem itself. I constructed it as a remix with Thimble, part of the Mozilla Webmaker suite of free tools. This kinetic text template was shared out a few months ago by some National Writing Project friends as part of MozFest in England. It allows you to really tinker with words and learn a bit about code, too. I was aiming to make words and phrases “do something” that connected to the flow of the meaning of the words and phrases. So, the word “fall” falls, and the “footsteps” grows and shrinks like a footstep walking and “shimmers” shimmers.
Check out the poem (and use the remix button at the top right to make your own)
I Walk with Wonder by Dogtrax
Peace (in the walk),
Kevin