(An April challenge to write and post a poem a day for a week, as hosted by Two Writing Teachers)
I began this Week in Poetry Challenge with a hyperlinked poem and so I guess I should end it on the same note. I took a short poem cycle that I wrote for my students and went into the site called Hypertextopia to investigate its possibilities for hyperlinked composition.
The result is something I am calling Writing is a Voyage, which is a collection of poems about the act of writing and teaching writing to my students.
In the interest of sharing, I am including the full opening poem here, too.
I stand in front of the classroom
pen in hand
and think out loud in concrete thoughts
as my mind wanders
in couplets and rhyme
and dangles downward
in acrostic fashion.
Sometimes, I strap them into the seat
with the 5-7-5 seatbelts of a haiku
and other times, I present them with the rare diamond
of the cinquain.
They are richer than their dreams
although few may realize it
until years later
when I am an old man with a cane
and a mouth full of knowledge.
I know my students often think me full of nonsense
but I can’t help myself:
I am someone who writes
and I want them to compose their lives, too,
so I urge them on
and find new paths to explore,
new doors to open,
and then give them a gentle push
into unknown terrain of their mind.
The ideas will be their fortification
on this personal journey.
May they go with the grace of words.
Here is a screenshot of my poem in Hypertextopia (and you can click on the image to bring you to the actual poem, too)
(An April challenge to write and post a poem a day for a week, as hosted by Two Writing Teachers)
In the Middle
Our friend tells him he is the peanut butter and jelly
between the bread,
and that spot has always made him at odds with himself.
The older and the younger — simultaneous positions — and wondering
where he truly fits in.
He is the first to love, the first to shout,
the first to reach out to those in pain,
the first to stake out his ground,
the first in affection for affection’s sake,
the first to slam the door.
Yet something is happening to him even as we speak,
something transforming him from unsettled force in the world
into this steady and stalwart child.
Perhaps he is coming into his own and no longer needs
the bread on either side to hold him
together in place.
In honor of National Poetry Month, this week’s Day in a Sentence is hereby converted into Day in a Poem. You are invited to boil down your day or your week into a poem of any choosing, including freestyle (so, technically, a sentence might still work, particularly if you were creative with your formatting).
I invite anyone and everyone to participate, including my friends from the One Week Poetry Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. I would love to see some of those folks join our Day in a Sentence community, too.
Please use the comment feature on this post to submit your words. I will collect and protect them all until Sunday, when I shall release them to the world.
I decided to write my poem as a Haiku, inspired by a complete lack of sleep last night due to cries from inside the house (bad dreams) and outside the house (a fischer cat attack, I think), plus our happy cat who purred most of the night (prob glad he was not outside when the attack took place). Meanwhile, this is an incredibly busy day — we have our Quidditch Championship all day today, the kids have baseball practice until nightfall, and then I agreed to go on Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast tonight to talk about hyperlinked composition and student publications.
A night of no sleep
does not bode well for a day
of Quidditch frenzy
PS — In looking at Two Writing Teachers today, they define a form of poetry called a senryu as sort of like a Haiku, but about human nature. Perhaps I wrote a senryu today and not a Haiku, as it is not about nature.
PSS — Next week, Ben B. will take the helm of Day in … something.
(An April challenge to write and post a poem a day for a week, as hosted by Two Writing Teachers)
Not Quite Ready
I’m not quite ready to let go
of all of this
but the release is inevitable.
I took him in my arms the other day
and hugged him,
kissed his head,
and he blushed — his friends were watching —
but I could tell it was still OK.
The path forward inches as fast as the growth upward
and still we see the shimmer of the baby in his eyes —
the first born —
although soon, we won’t be looking down — we’ll be looking up.
And I’m not quite ready to let go.
(An April challenge to write and post a poem a day for a week, as hosted by Two Writing Teachers)
How To Build a Butterfly
I’ll show you, Daddy,
how to build a butterfly
from crayon colors and blue sky moments.
Look here as the wings take shape on gossamer dreams
against a green backdrop of the fresh spring grass.
It’s delicate, Daddy,
and only for your eyes, not your fingers.
My butterfly dances on the moon
when the moon is hiding,
so that only the two of them dance together
in tap-step harmony.
That is how you build a butterfly, Daddy.
What wondrous thing will you create, he says,
as I think, you.
(An April challenge to write and post a poem a day for a week, as hosted by Two Writing Teachers)
Older Brothers
They stand
hands in pockets
watching
themselves as younger boys
when baseball was fun
and not just another mark on the calendar
with the coach mad
at some missed catch
and the game on the line
and all that stress
that follows you right up to the pitcher’s mound
night after night after night
and you can see it in their crooked stance
how they are pretending to run the bases in their minds
with high-five celebrations all around
and nothing but time on their hands.
The older they are,
the more they think how great it would be
to be young again
while the younger ones
hold close to aspirations of beating their brothers
at baseball.
A few people have asked me how I created the piece and what are the possibilities for the classroom. I appreciate all the friends on Twitter and others (Bonnie, Paul, etc) who gave me feedback as I was putting the poem cycle together.
So, here goes:
The Composition:
I wrote the main arc of the poem, knowing it would be a launching pad for smaller poems. I did not go into the piece knowing how many trunks it would have and I didn’t worry about it. Although I thought the piece should reflect the concept of identity and writing in the Web 2.0 world, I wasn’t sure how the piece would develop as a poem. So, I just wrote. It was a flurry of words and I just let it come out of me. Later, I looked at the piece and began to imagine where the connections to other poems might originate. These became parts of the links beyond the central poem.
So I moved to the smaller poems, keeping in the back of my mind the words from the main piece and then imagining how it might all come together, like some poetic puzzle. I worked in keywords that I knew could branch off later and tried like heck to keep it from sounding to false when doing that. I worried that the construction of the larger project would take away from the emotional center of the smaller poems. I really wanted each poem to be able to stand on its own and jettisoned a few that did not. Again, I tried to move around the singular theme of the main piece — how we see ourselves as writers in this changing world.
The Construction:
Once I had the words, I had to figure out how to put it together. This was tricky. I tried a wiki. Didn’t work as I wanted it. I tried Google Docs. Didn’t like it either. I went into Dreamweaver (an html builder program) and started building a webpage. I copied the code from Dreamweaver and tried to make it a page on this blog. Didn’t work. I considered Google Page Creator but it was too limiting. In the end, I decided to keep using Dreamweaver and then host the page at my band’s website. This was not ideal but it works.
I used anchors (designated points on the page), so that I could keep everything on one single page, with the links floating up and down the page. I realized early on that I needed something that brought readers back to the main poem and decided that the word “I” would be the link.
My goal all along was to create something with words, sound, image and video, and so my first attempt had podcasts built into the texts. But some friends found that all the audio started automatically (even though my html code said otherwise) on their browsers (seemed mostly with Flock). I wanted the poem to work on any browser, so I scratched that, and created little video-podcast clips that are hosted at YouTube. The images came from Flickr, with Creative Commons licenses, and I made sure to cite where they were originally located.
I used my little Flip flash video camera to record myself reading a few of the poems, for variety and some emotional impact. It was difficult to keep eye contact with the camera, since I was reading the poems. And there is a little black dot on the camera lens (inside) that annoys me. The podcasts were done using my Olympus voice recorder.
I thought it would be interesting to show all the connections among the poems, since every single one links to at least one other. So I turned to Bubble.Us to create a concept map, with arrows showing the connections. I’m still trying to figure out if the poem should stand on its own or use the map as an entry point, and I am now leaning towards stand-alone. I think the map, while a nice ancillary object, may be too distracting.
The Implications:
I already have my students doing a variation of this hyperlinked project. It is much less complex than mine, obviously, and I struggled with a publishing platform. I don’t expect to teach my kids Dreamweaver (heck, I barely know it myself) and I am not ready for a week of html lessons, either (is that on standardizes testing?).
I know you can do this type of embedded links even in Word (using a folder with multiple documents) but putting it on the Net from Word is tricky, particularly when you consider I have 80 students. In the end, I decided upon MS PowerPoint, as you can set up a project and then do internal linking within the show itself. Plus, for my students, the platform is familiar and we be using it again later this year for digital picture books.
Last week, I had my students write four short poems on a single theme and then they started to create their PowerPoints. We’ll do some finishing up later this week. They were quite intrigued with the concept of linking. My hope is to find a few that we can publish as part of the new Space student publishing project now underway. (See sneak preview of Space)
As usual, I also created a sample of a project (I always try to do the assignments I give my students) and my theme was (surprise) writing. Here is what it looks like in Slideshare (although the internal links won’t work). But you can also view the Writing: A Linked Poem Powerpoint here as a download.
| View | Upload your ownI am open to ideas that you may have on how to extend this into the classroom.
I’ve been thinking about hyper-linked writing for some time. I love the idea of associative thinking and in particular, how poetry might fit into that concept. But I haven’t dipped my toes into that water until now. First, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim at Teachers Teaching Teachers did a recent show on composing with hyperlink that was quite interesting. The show featured a site called Hypertextopia, which is being developed by a graduate student. Paul thinks it has echoes of StorySpace.
Also recently, George Mayo launched the student publication site called Space, with the intent of allowing students to become more creative in how they use the Web 2.0 canvas for composition.
And, of course, it is Poetry Month, and over at Two Writing Teachers, there is a one-week poetry marathon of sorts going on.
All of these events moved me towards composing something a little bit different and results of that effort is a poem cycle for Web 2.o that I am calling: Capturing Myself in Hyperlink: A Poem of Connections .
In spare moments here and there during the course of a few days, I wrote this entire poem cycle. I really got into how the smaller poems informed the larger one and how the pieces could connect, if you took a wide enough angle. However, I also wanted each poem to work on its own, too. It’s like wedges into the mind.
Here is the main branch of the poem:
Capturing Myself in Hyperlink
Is this the way in
or the way out
of this wireless space of thoughts
and shouts that echo beyond the screen.
In-between is the reality.
There is movement among the letters: nothingis stagnant;
nothing is still; nothing is shattered until the cursor moves
and then the path is forged fast-forward
into parallelwords of perpendicular thoughts.
I write from inside out, not from left to right,
as if this composition were a new languagebeing invented
by turning the world upside down,
with meaning embedded deep down below the surface.
What you seeis not what you get.
What you see is what you should forget
when meaning is captured in html.
Perhaps you’ll dancewith me here
and follow my movements on this virtual stage,
even as you most likely reach for the curtains
and turn down the lights for the night.
My act lives on in space.
There are two full versions of the poem cycle right now.
First, you can go to the first version I did as a free-standing website. This was the original version that I continue to tinker with. That can be accessed here.
Or, you can go follow a concept map that I created in Bubble.Us and click on the parts of the poem. This map gives another entry into a second version of the poem cycle — including a background image of the concept map — and shows the connections of the parts to the whole. (I also embedded the map down below).
I will be doing a longer reflection on the process of composing the poem and the construction of the entire piece tomorrow, and I hope to get into some possibilities for bringing this idea into the classroom, too.I would love to get some comments or suggestions on the poem cycle.In particular, does either version stand out as better than the other? Does the concept map make the poem more associative in thinking or just plain confusing? Which version gives you, the reader, more freedom to follow your own path?Peace (in poems),
Kevin
You can sign up for a poem to be delivered to your email inbox every day for the month, and I already have two wonderful gems come my way. This is just one way to celebrate the art of poetry, which hopefully extends across the year.
I’ve been thinking about Twitter a lot lately, about the pros and cons, and I woke this morning with the lines of this poem dancing in my head. (Twitter is a network that connects people by asking them to write about what they are doing right at that moment) So I worked on it and recorded it as a podcast, sharing it out.
I would love to know what the Twitter friends think about it.
I dream in Twitter
in 140 characters
that cut off my thoughts before they are complete
and then I wonder, why 140?
Ten more letters would serve me right
as I write about what I am doing at that moment
in time,
connecting across the world with so many others
shackled by 140 characters, too,
and I remain amazed at how deep the brevity can be.
I find it unsettling to eavesdrop on conversations
between two
when you can only read one
and it startles me to think that someone else out there
has put their ear to my words
and wondered the same about me.
Whose eyes are watching?
Twitter is both an expanding universe
of tentacles and hyperlinks that draw you in
with knowledge and experience
and a shrinking neighborhood of similar voices,
echoing out your name
in comfortable silence.
I dream in Twitter
in 140 characters,
and that is what I am doing
right
at
this
moment.
