Let's Talk Poetry: Part Four

Ok. So, if you've gotten this far in my admittedly scatterbrained four-part series, you might have asked yourself: what in the heck has this got to do with running a paperless classroom?

Well, you got me. It's not got that much to do with running a paperless classroom. Except in this way: in thinking out loud about my experiences with the Web, I've begun to think about how those experiences led me to go paperless and also to think about why in some quarters what I'm doing seems either a) so weird b) so useless or c) so soapbox-ish.

Concerning the former: guilty as charged. A paperless classroom is weird. I've taught in public school, I've taught in private school, I've done observations of charter schools and GT youth centers, and of course I went through school myself. And yes, the paperless classroom is totally weird. But not in the novelty sort of way. Rather, in that it's so effortless. Naysayers often accuse me of being a tech-head, but in fact, despite the fact that the structure of my classes remains entirely technological, the content and discussion that arises in those classes is as entirely humanistic and liberal-arts-minded as the best classes of my own experience as a student ever were. In fact, the technology -- if anything -- only gives us more time for my students and I to actually talk to one another rather than sit through mind-numbing lectures. Weird, yeah.

Second, technology is only as useful or useless as you want it to be. Hammers aren't very useful when you need to screw something in. That said, to live one's life refusing to ever pick up a hammer means a lot of loose nails.

Finally, I admit (and it should be obvious to any of the regular readers here) that I'm more than a bit wordy. I chalk that up to those early reading experiences and the over-indulgence in Kerouac as a kid. But if I do occasionally sound like I'm up on a soapbox, it's only because I really do care about what's happening with educational technology. And I don't want us to lose sight of the 'educational' part of 'educational technology'. We can teach kids to use blogs til the cows come home, but if we don't give them the critical and creative skills they need to use their minds to produce content and analysis, well then we're just gonna be stuck with a bunch of mindless drones anyway. If however, we denigrate the 'technology' part of 'educational technology' we do so at great peril. Because if we let them out into the world of the 21st century without 21st century skills, it's like letting 'em loose on the highway without drivers' ed. It'll be a bloodbath.

Back to poetry.

Phil and I, over far too many cups of coffee in the basement of Dudley House, decided to call our online multilingual poetry journal 'Annetna Nepo', or 'Open Antenna' in reverse. The idea was that we'd create a space on the Web that was for poetry the equivalent of a busy European train-station. Nothing but flashes and fleeting glimpses of a host of languages flittering through passing conversation, strident over loudspeakers, missed in the hushed whispers of a mother to her children. We put out two issues and in the course of a few months we met poets of the most amazing caliber from Wales to Eritrea and back again. Within days of opening shop, we had a team of translators from California to England who wanted to help us understand the mixed language soup we were compiling.

Phil's since gone on to a university professorship and I've obviously gone on to do my own things. But, when I read over my students' blogs; when I see the connections they are making and the 'places' they have visited; I can't help but think back to those days of editing that poetry magazine. I can't help but think about the connections and networks that I developed through poetry, art, and the Web. And I feel the full thrust of what technology and the liberal arts can do when they realize a synergy of elements rather than dwell on their differences.

Let's Talk Poetry: Part Three

The Internet was different back then.

First of all, things didn't look as glitzy as they do now. Often when people did try to spice up their pages with graphics, the results were schmaltzy at best.

Second was that there was still this underground network vibe that was a hold-over of the old BBS days. I sort of feel like the BBS posters were the Ham Radio operators of the Digital Age. But, they were the ones who laid the foundation for what we now call the Blogosphere.

So, devoid of all the commercialism and crap that's all over the Internet today, those stoic early days were actually pretty cool.

Because I was trying to place my lousy poems with various online sources, I started running into like-minded folks in other areas of the arts. One of the biggest influences on my thinking to this day was my encounter with the Mail Art Network. Having begun following the Fluxus and Happening Scenes of the 1960's and inspired initially by the work of artist Ray Johnson, Mail Art was (and is) an informal network of artists who share and collaborate via sending small pieces of art to one another via the postal service. A spirit of collaboration and freedom exists within the network which is by turns kitsch and naive on one day, and profound on the next; much of this is fostered by a tradition of collaborative art exchanges and unjuried exhibitions. Things may have changed, but at least back then there was no money in it and the focus was often on the network itself.

While there were certainly more than a fair share of vanity projects, occasionally a truly inspired show would pop up such as an anti-death-penalty exhibition in an old Spanish castle that brought together work by hundreds of artists across the globe or such as a simple postcard show in 1999 at Chicago's Peace Museum that asked the simple question: What are your thoughts going into the new millennium?

Behind all of this -- for better or worse -- was a spirit of networking. Not in this case for the purpose of getting a better job or making more money, but just for the sake of being a creative outlet.

I remember in those days that many people involved in the network were teachers. I sent a small piece in to an exhibition that took place in a school in France; the kids organized and curated the show; I can only imagine the kinds of backflips proponents of Project Based Learning would do to have kids organize an international art exhibition as a class project.

I say all of this for one purpose. And that's to bring up the notion of 'network' and what that means.

There's been a lot of talk lately about '21st Century Skills' and whether or not this is some ploy by software companies or computer geeks to take over the minds of our youths. Well, as I see it, the most important 21st Century Skill is the ability to navigate in a connected global network. This is something that I learned as a guy back in the '90s just trying to get his poetry published and it's something that I see every single day in my students' blogging activities.

Yesterday, I posted a sort of manifesto/philosophy/quasi-policy thing. But, I'm not philosopher. I'm no policy wonk. I'm just a guy in a classroom. A guy in a classroom who's been engaged in that global network in both the most ridiculous as well as occasionally sublime ways for well over a decade now.

Yet I don't consider myself a Digital Native. Digital Natives are kids who were born after 1990. Us folks who were born between 1970 and 1990 are more like Digital Slackers. We used the stuff for what we needed to, but we didn't really see how it would be the prime source of our 'intellegence gathering operations' ;)

We grew up with LPs and then cassette tapes and then CDs. Technology was a blur, but it was a physical thing. You could break an LP. Or a cassette. Or a CD.

Try breaking an MP3.

What I'm getting at is that Y2K marked a shift away from the Analog Age into the Digital Age. And even though I was unwittingly taking part in that shift, it didn't really hit me until blogs and RSS technology and Web 2.0 came along. It didn't make sense until the power of technology caught up with the power of human networking. I considered technology with a healthy dose of skepticism. While friends were signing up for MySpace, I was working in an old bookstore. For me, the networking aspect of the Web and the conversational aspect of real life were the same thing. But, what I didn't realize and what many folks didn't realize was that this fusion of self-publishing, instant communication, and networking was in fact laying the foundation of what would be the 21st century's true break from the 20th.

Back to poetry.

In 2003, my buddy Phil and I started a short-lived online poetry journal. There were millions of these e-zines hovering out there in the cloud, but we were doing something different.

We were going to take this global network thing and this bookworm thing and bring them together in a way that would be unintelligible even to us. He was a French scholar. I was a Latin and Greek geek.

We were going to start a multilingual poetry review devoid of translations.

...to be continued...

Let's Talk Poetry: Part Two

I read Ford Maddox Ford's list of 'books one must read' and found it to be a bit lacking, so I went about creating my own list. Poetry books quickly found their way to the top of the list.

Pound's Cantos
William Carlos Williams' Selected Poems published by New Directions
Baudelaire in the original French
Lowell's Life Studies and Berryman's Dream Songs
Ginsberg's Fall of America
Anything by Susan Howe
Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight
Everything I could find by Robert Creeley
Rilke's Duino Elegies

I read constantly and I start to write. I've recently read some of my early poems and they look at best like something bearing more resemblance to rock-n-roll lyrics than to Modern poesy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that! But it bears mentioning...)

I continued writing, occasionally publishing a few things here and there in little local zines and college papers. It wasn't until around 1997 and owning my first real computer that I really started taking my own writing of poetry as seriously as my reading of it.

For one thing, I'd always preferred typing to handwriting, so the computer made sense to me as a tool. Secondly, I am notoriously disorganized. So a simple system of filing poems on the computer was an enormous help and, before long, each of those folders had grown to a book's length collection of poems. Although none of this work was up-to-snuff when I compared it to my heroes, at least seeing the folders grow -- and hence my output becoming sort of a personal library -- was motivational to me in a way that coffee-stained stacks of paper never were.

The owning of that computer coincided with my first real introduction to the Internet. And within days of first getting online, I was meeting online poets and publishers and placing my own work.

This is not to say that those poets and publishers were necessarily legit, nor is it to say that my own work was any good. In fact, like all old poetry, it sort of makes me cringe to see it now. Nonetheless, I can say that it was the responsiveness in those heady early days of the Internet (at least as far as I was concerned) that got me thinking again about publishing houses -- just as I did back in the library when I was a boy.

I began thinking about publishing houses because that's how I'd come to know poetry in the first place. And here I was online encountering poetry -- some good, most very very bad -- in a different way.

...to be continued...

Let's Talk Poetry: Part One

'Round about 1994 or so, I sat in a crowd of students and seekers at the feet of Allen Ginsberg. This was at a gathering on the southern shores of Maryland and my first and only time seeing Ginsberg in the flesh. He had already had his stroke, and so his body was a bit frail and his eyes and mouth made a strange and wonderful sight as he rocked back and forth singing the verses of 'O, Father Death' along to the accompaniment of his little squeeze-box.

I had been an early reader. By kindergarten, I was on an eighth grade level. I remember the kindergarten teachers taking me up to the eighth grade classrooms like I was some sort of strange alien to be marveled at. Even then, I remember the whole thing being kinda creepy.

I remember reading 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' at age six or seven. I read most of it aloud to my grandfather who had given me a copy and said, "I've never read this. Why don't you read it to me?" I consider him to have been a great reading teacher. He also taught me how to master the Rubic's Cube and how to use the dampers on the piano (though I couldn't reach them).

I read a lot throughout my school days. But not a whole lot of what I was supposed to. In lieu of doing homework, I'd hang out at the library and read as much as I could -- and not by particular author or genre, but by publisher. I quickly got hooked to all the great novels published by Vintage Classics as well as the noir mysteries put out by their mystery subsidiary a bit later on. One day, I think in eighth grade, I happened upon an Evergreen copy of Kerouac's 'The Subterraneans'. By the end of that day, I'd finished that book and gotten three-quarters of the way through 'On the Road'.

Which led me directly to Ginsberg.

I still remember the first time I read 'Howl'. I couldn't help but read it aloud. There I was, thirteen or fourteen years old, jumping around my room blurting out phrases like:

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement...

I was a Catholic-school boy from Baltimore. My mother was a florist. So much as I'd remembered, with the exception of a trip to Disney World, I'd never traveled farther in the universe than Philadelphia. What in the heck were 'eyeball kicks'?!?

But it made sense to me. It made sense because more than anything else I was a READER. Reading was the one constant in my life. It was the one thing that really lifted me out of the shell of a rather mundane existence. And now I had discovered poetry. And I was hooked.

...to be continued...