Guest writers category archives
Photos and text by Teju Cole
(Sunday, August 22, 2010. West Broadway and Murray Street. There are several speakers.)
Where are the Islamists right now, standing here arm in arm with us, saying that this is wrong? Where are they?
I don’t think it is wrong.
To build a victory tower on the deaths of our citizens? Read more…
by Nathan Moore and Dana Guthrie Martin
When sharing poems on the internet,
it is important not to consider an audience
of square dancers and nudists but to focus instead
on less “mainstream” readers: the tracing-paper
addicts and chronic organ grinders.
The latter are especially unreasonable and will offer
poetry critique at inappropriate times, such as when
they want to feel better about their own shoddy
attempts at plastic surgery.
Password protection of poems offers a sense of security,
although a misguided emphasis on the sanctity
of toadstools and juke boxes prevents poets
from enjoying steady employment.
Everyone knows the point of sharing poems
on the internet is to keep them hidden away
like secret regrets. Yet we find that the more
we behave like flashers, the more we have to spend
on trench coats.
Likewise, our public invitations to square dances
and raves, though almost universally rejected,
are still our only chance at being rubbed all over
other people’s hair, causing it to stand on end.
This brings us to copyright issues. The ownership
of a poem, like the ownership of a washing machine
or cat, is pretty simple: Just slap an ID tag on it
and you’re good to go — or so we thought.
As it turns out, in the murky world of the internet,
your “cat,” however “cat-like” it may appear,
might yet turn out to be a washing machine.
How will you know what to do with it?
Do you open its mouth and fill it with Tide,
or do you take another route and stop washing
your clothes altogether? Soiled shirts
will definitely make you look like a poet.
The phenomenon of poetic recognition is crucial
to a sense of online community. Waking up one day
and realizing three or four people know your name
is akin spotting a UFO: You know it’s real, but you
can’t lay your hands on the evidence.
This is why poet-bloggers turn to their oracles,
Statcounter and Google Alert, neither of which
need be consulted more than 400 times a day.
Every page view produces a sensation similar
to sliding along a Slip-n-Slide covered in baby oil.
Toxicologists fret about enthusiastic bloggers’ tendency
to lick their monitors until the words smear. The aftermath
can be measured in parts per million: How many
poets’ nouns must bleed into the verbs of casual readers
before this behavior is seen as a public health risk?
*
Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore between them have more experience blogging poetry than anyone I know. In addition to their personal blogs, My Gorgeous Somewhere and Exhaust Fumes and French Fries, they are founder/publisher/director and community and membership director, respectively, of Read Write Poem, and founders and inaugural curators of an innovative new online journal called Mutating the Signature, a WordPress-ennabled “space where issues are produced by two curators working together to write for, with and to each other over the course of the issue.” MTS is an outgrowth of a previous collaborative blog of the same name that the two of them had at the same URL, which was an outgrowth of an issue of qarrtsiluni, also called Mutating the Signature, which they co-edited, as well as an earlier, collaborative poetry blog for a larger group that they were both active in.
Earlier in this series, British writer Dick Jones also tackled the subject of blogging and poetry, in case you missed it: “Poetry in the Ether.”
by Joan Ryan
The morning dawns, now comes the test:
‘Twas on last night. How bout the rest?
It’s on in morning, down at night.
It seems to take turns taking flight.
And just when I get used to this
It takes another nasty twist.
Now on at midnight gone at noon.
The blog has now reversed its tune.
Last night (or was it morning then?)
I snuck a blog peek once again.
Lo and behold, it was back up
But this alone can’t fill my cup.
All day I checked to see just when
The blog would go back down again.
Did Pennsylvania’s main electric
Power source go all dyspeptic?
Hey! Maybe there’ll be some relief.
My tale, once met with disbelief,
Was verified by other fans
Who crept more shyly from the stands.
GoDaddy, was this group to blame?
Could they have messed up domain name?
It seems it wasn’t fault of Dad
So Dave then wrote WebHostingPad
Who promised to redress the glitch.
In just one day they’d do the fix.
I think it’s holding. Wow! That’s good!
But still I tend to knock on wood.
I’m praying that it will not fail
And soon perhaps I can exhale.
I’m positively all off track
Till Negativa’s truly back.
*
Thanks to Joan for the light verse, which she self-deprecatingly calls “bloggerel” (though I beg to differ: true doggerel’s distinguishing feature is that its author intends it to be serious poetry). I am also indebted to her for insisting that I had a problem, finally prompting me to post a query on Facebook and ask if anyone else was getting “server not found” messages when they tried to visit vianegativa.us. Thanks to everyone who responded there. With fifty percent reporting problems accessing the site, I knew the problem wasn’t with Joan’s ISP, as I had originally thought/hoped.
GoDaddy is where the vianegativa.us domain is registered, and WebHostingPad is where the site resides. Once I felt fairly sure the problem was with the latter and contacted tech support, they responded almost immediately: “I apologize; there was an error with the DNS settings for your domain name.” I liked the personal touch, and the fact that the fellow knew how to deploy a semicolon. Joan’s fingers are still crossed, she says, but I feel fairly certain the problem has been resolved.
In an ideal world, Honduran ousted president Manuel Zelaya would return to power, the coup leaders would be tried and sentenced to prison, and Zelaya’s non-binding referendum on constitutional reform would be allowed to go ahead. But we live in a world where the U.S. calls the shots, and the U.S. has basically told Zelaya: “As president you railed against us and now you come asking for help because even your ALBA friends (Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador) are not much help in this one.”
The U.S. is willing to help Zelaya in order to live up to its image as a supporter of democracy, but that help will come at a price. The U.S. does not want Latin America to drift away from its sphere of influence and fall into the sphere of countries such as China, Russia, and Iran. Thus, it does not wish to betray its traditional allies that have served it well: the elites and the military, who throughout Latin American history have controlled the economies and populations of their respective countries.
This being the case, Zelaya will probably have to give up on his constitutional referendum, and the coup perpetrators (including the military that have been busy beating and killing coup opponents) will receive amnesty in return for him being allowed to finish his term. Such a result would mean a win for the conservative forces, since Zelaya’s attempt to reform the constitution in order to decentralize power and turn Honduras into a participatory democracy is what sparked the coup.
The Honduran constitution, drafted in 1982 under the auspices of the Reagan administration, was designed to concentrate power in the hands of the two ruling parties: the Liberal and the National party. These parties, in turn, are controlled by the Honduran elite, made up of wealthy businessmen and cattle ranchers. Grassroots groups and popular organizations — indigenous, women, peasant, and labor groups — are given little representation under the current constitution and hence the need for reform.
Yet not all is necessarily lost for Zelaya’s cause. Upon his return, he should appoint a new chief of the armed forces with no allegiance to the elites. He should then begin to reduce the size of the military (Costa Rica and Panama have done away with theirs) to lessen its clout and avoid a repeat of last month’s ill-advised incident. He should withdraw from the conservative Liberal party to which he belongs and from which he has moved away ideologically, and either form his own party or join forces with the leftist Democratic Union Party (PUD).
The November presidential elections should be pushed back to allow for new primaries, since the current candidates from the Liberal and National parties, Elvin Santos and Porfirio Lobo, supported the coup and have lost legitimacy in the eyes of many — and may actually have become legally ineligible to run. The general elections to follow will then be a true test of Zelaya’s popularity. If the candidate from his party were to win, a referendum on constitutional reform could be carried out some time in 2010, and perhaps Honduras would come out of this ordeal with a strengthened democracy, one that includes the Honduran poor, and a diminished, non-politicized military.
Alexis Aguilar, Honduran American
Salisbury, Maryland
See Alexis’s website for more analysis and links, including contact links for U.S. and OAS officials. Further reliable political analysis, for example on the Honduran Supreme Court’s highly dubious claim that the coup was legal, may be found at Two Week’s Notice: A Latin American Politics Blog. —Dave
by Dick Jones of Patteran Pages
When I started to write poetry as a suffocatingly earnest, paralysingly intense teenager, I scribbled down everything as it emerged into a small, blue school exercise book. Just beneath the heavily-scored-out printed title of ‘Spelling Book’, I inscribed the words ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’, carefully foxed the edges of the pages, distressed the cover and thrust the slim volume just far enough into my jacket pocket for the title to be clearly visible.
Now, as a writer of poems in late middle age (60 being the new 40), I have graduated from ‘Spelling Book’ to Moleskine, but I still scribble down everything as it emerges onto its pages. If I put the two books side by side — which I just have — the only significant differences I note are that a.) whilst I read ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’ with a mixture of dry-mouthed embarrassment and wry amusement, the contents of the Moleskine bring a little more satisfaction, and b.) my handwriting has got worse during the past 45 years.
All of which constitutes an unpromising start to a piece on links between writing poetry and information technology. However, cherished notebooks notwithstanding, I would claim that the latter has had a more profound influence on the former than any of the other forces that chance or design have brought to bear during the long years since ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’. Here’s how.
I came to computer usage late. I maintained a lofty indifference to their rapid incursion into our lives during the ’80s, only finally deigning to tickle a keyboard when my son needed some help in typing up his degree thesis against a rapidly approaching deadline. Within 30 minutes of applying the changeover technique from typewriter percussion to keyboard caress, I was seduced. On changing schools in the early ’90s and having access to the staff computer room, I launched myself onto what, at that time, comprised the Internet.
Even in those early days there was a handful of poetry sites and one or two e-mags too. I submitted some stuff to one called So It Goes and — maybe unsurprisingly, considering the thin scattering of e-poets across the territory — got it published.
But initially there was little to promote or even sustain the interests of the online poet and for me the principal utility of the computer was as a composing and editing tool. The speed at which a poem could be formatted, amended and re-formatted was intoxicating and, after a few deranged weeks of font and layout experimentation, the flexibility and range of the medium began to have a profound influence over the structure and substance of the message. Even in those early days of tiny monitors, keyboards like pub pianos and regular encounters with the blue screen of death, the pixel dance that had words spinning across the digital page enabled a synchronicity of content and form simply unobtainable within the humble notebook. Buying my own computer enabled me to reach beyond the limitations of Windows 95 and queues for each terminal, and being very definitely the first on my block to wire in cable broadband had me uploading and downloading at frightening speed.
As my facility both in keyboard technique and computer procedure developed, I began to transfer all my painstakingly typed manuscripts to various digital files and folders. And surfing on broadband gave me rapid access to the now burgeoning poetry sites. Here the clunky but comprehensive Electronic Poetry Center was enormously useful, providing links to the growing number of e-mags and also to the burgeoning poetry workshops. I joined two of the latter, one a multi-channelled come-one-come-all community in which effete sonnet-eers shared cyberspace with agonised goths, the other a jittery, nitpicking group of high-achieving monomaniacs seeking validation for their oeuvre.
Flitting between the two brought little creative satisfaction, but what it did provide was a degree of interaction and this was enormously exciting. Suddenly, after years of scribbling first drafts into scruffy notebooks, the final incarnations of which efforts only saw light of day when under the withering scrutiny of little mag editors, fresh work in progress was receiving the attention of my peers. Although there was a powerful sense of rivalry and general muscle flexing on the site, decent criticism was offered too and I lingered for a while and indulged the novelty of the slow motion dialogues. The process of submission of text and leisurely response was like a protracted game of chess, two players leaning over a complex board analysing the display before making a considered move.
But in the final analysis it all became a little too arid and cerebral for me. Jokes and asides were judiciously ignored in the pursuit of critical excellence and, jaded and feeling a little fraudulent in such arcane company, I dropped out one long rainy afternoon and floated off into cyberspace. I was unclear as to what it was that I hoped to find, but the potential for a much more broadly based interactivity seemed to me, in my ignorance, vast and untapped.
And so, much in the manner of the exobiologist exploring the cosmos, I guess I was looking for signs of parallel life — kindred spirits inhabiting some deep space archipelago, opening up the lines of communication and, in the best tradition of the sci-fi romance, all speaking the same language as me.
Which is how I discovered the phenomenon of the weblog. I’d heard of ‘blogs’, of course, but the notion of the online diary recording in minute quotidian detail the life and times of a Media Studies student or a post office clerk held little appeal. What I found was exhilaratingly different. By chance, my first encounter with the blog in action was via Salon, the liberal news and views clearing house, which, in 2003, still hosted a substantial blogging community. Scanning through a cross-section of the blogs on board, I marvelled at the extraordinary variety of topic and treatment and signed up.
Had I had the ghost of an idea of the struggles ahead in trying to master the diabolical complexities of the Radio Userland software, I might never have set down the foundations of the Patteran Pages. But with lunatic persistence I persevered and so began the steep uphill ascent that — in between major Sisyphian descents — comprised the final rite of passage in my IT education. For three years the Patteran Pages operated from the security of the Salon Blogs community. A blog platforming homebrew poetry alongside bits of splenetic political commentary and items showcasing the juvenile humour of its proprietor found plenty of elbow space amongst the Salon misfits. Firm friendships were forged and a powerful sense of mutual endeavour prevailed.
But eventually the gasket blew in my RU engine room and when Lawrence, the overworked and under-appreciated Salon Blogs techie, finally nursed it back into life, I still couldn’t upload pictures. So I ventured forth into the wide-open spaces outside the Salon stockade, choosing Typepad as my new host. Which is where I have been more or less comfortably ever since. Within a few months of my departure from the Salon blog community, Salon announced that they were discontinuing blog hosting and a diaspora followed. I have retained contact with a handful of my erstwhile comrades, but links to the majority of blogs on my sidebar have been made since the move.
I’m now in my sixth year of blogging. I can work within the flexible and largely user-friendly procedures of the Typepad format with confidence, but in some ways I regret the rapid advance of template technology. Having begun to master HTML in order to deal with the eccentricities of Radio Userland, the off-the-shelf technology of Typepad has made me lazy. Where I might have further advanced my IT skills by exploring design possibilities, my concentration is now entirely on content with the emphasis being on the presentation of my own poetry.
Lately it occurs to me: What a long, strange trip it’s been. Long and strange indeed, but exciting, enriching and fruitful too. At a time of life when many are contemplating not a lot more than consolidating what they’ve already got, I find the daily adventure of blogging — the devising, the sharing, the research, the reading, the interacting — revitalising and energising. Most of all, it has provided, and continues to provide, a powerful stimulus to my writing. Everything I write goes into the notebook first; I never compose straight onto screen. But there exists a continuum of creativity now whereby from the privacy and seclusion of the first scribbled elements of a poem, a route is followed through the portals of the keyboard, the computer and the router into the wider world. Way outside the scope of my wildest sci-fi dreams back in the far-off days of ‘Poems — 1960 Until Whenever’, but cherished beyond measure now.
Dear Dave,
Most of the days have been full of green rain and clouds the color
of magnolia petals as they rot in the emerging grasses. Three weeks ago
I planted half the potatoes (white Kennebecs), and just Monday
they broke the earth, a salad of leaves sprinkled with clay. The other half
(Adirondack reds) went into the earth yesterday. When I stuffed my hand
in the burlap sack to draw them out one by one, I discovered some had begun
to rot. I’ll bet the same will happen to us when the hasp of our bodies
is unbolted, that is, if we’ll allow it: old men wrapped in cloth, stuck
in pine boxes during the days of dogwood, its white shining and the Judas tree
just past. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that above our heads there are lady’s
slippers puffed pink and yellow, the world, as round as wild sarsaparilla’s globe,
spinning and spinning, never really going anywhere new, yet full of vengeance
and mercy and the most foolish blessings of these potatoes we’ll harvest in July
and August, boiled, then mashed—a river of butter and milk, salt and sugar,
the bitter pepper that makes us want to gorge ourselves upon this one sweet life.
by Pica of Feathers of Hope and Bird by Bird
Publishing houses that will print poetry are almost extinct (I know Dave B. Porcupine would argue that so are readers of poetry), yet the numbers of people writing poetry seem to have grown at an equal or greater rate. Some of them self-publish online or at print-on-demand shops like Lulu.com, but there can be a considerable cost to doing even small numbers in this way.
Just to get a bit low-tech on you for a second: you can hand-bind books yourself.
When a poet friend, Rachel Barenblat, had a miscarriage earlier this year and worked her way through the trauma and grief by writing poetry, yet wondered how to make these poems available to others going through a similar experience, I suggested a small hand-bound edition. Ten poems, title page, table of contents, acknowledgments: this adds up to 15 pages, plus one blank at the back. The magic 16. (Bookbinders think in multiples of eight and get super excited when all the pages add up to multiples of 32…) We settled on a tall, skinny format which conveniently fit on a standard letter-size sheet, folded in half: a pamphlet.
How to do it
Get familiar with your printer, and with whatever software you use to produce sheets with your poetry on them. (I use Adobe InDesign because I’m a designer but you can do this quite adequately on a word processor.) Always make a dummy and number its pages and then unfold them, so you know where the poems are going to fall. And then put them all together before you run off large numbers to be sure it still works. You can use imposition software but it’s not necessary; what IS necessary is a good understanding of where each page is going to end up after folding. Automatic pagination is not your friend here.
Find the longest line of any of your poems and work backwards in the design of your page from that (if the line will be split, find the longest line that won’t). Try and leave a generous gutter/central space, which should almost never be smaller than the optical margin of the outside when the booklet is held open. Remember to leave a wider margin at the foot of the page than the top and outside margins, to avoid that sinking feeling.
In terms of typography, remember that you can use a relatively small font size if you allow generous leading (interline spacing). Look at books of printed poetry and see what they do and what you like, and why, and what you don’t like, and why, and use those to guide your page design. Try and identify the character, the personality, of typefaces and match the character of your poetry. Less is usually more with typography… it is almost never a good plan to use more than two typefaces in a book of poetry (or much else), and if you are tempted to do this, ask yourself why. Let the poems sing for themselves rather than be tripped up by clunky type.
You can use a simple sheet as the cover or you can use different paper, or papers. You can do collage, you can paint on them, you can use photos. Experiment. You don’t have a publisher’s marketing department breathing down your neck! Just make sure that the grain of the pages matches the grain of the cover or it will buckle.
There are many online resources for bookbinding.
What you need
A better reader
As I folded the sheets for Rachel’s book, 176 in all, getting engulfed in the rhythm that comes from doing a repetitive task for love, I started seeing the same lines over and over. A different word would jump forward. I noticed connections within stanzas, within poems, across poems. In short, I was reading the poems in a different way. A better way. Binding poetry makes me a better reader. Try it; I think you’ll discover new things about your poetry — or someone else’s. And you’ll have a few hand-bound booklets to give or keep or even — gasp — sell.
***
Still to come in this series, I hope, are guest-written pieces on typewriters, Twaiku, Facebook update poetry, Second Life, and more. If you have an idea for an essay you’d like to contribute, let me know.
by Peter of Slow Reads
I woke up yesterday, the first Saturday of spring break, and found Victoria next to me, hunched over her third graders’ papers and humming.
I was about to tell you how good those papers were — how some of them evinced better voice and grammar than many of my ninth graders’ papers, in fact — and to expound on why I think most kids don’t progress much in grammar during the intervening years that lay in bed between us yesterday, the first Saturday of spring break.
But I just decided to interrupt myself, as I often do with my high school writers, and to remind you that you’re here as writers. So, did my first line hook you? And, if so, have I lost you by now? (Be honest. Are you still reading?)
And, dear writer, did you catch the syntax of that first line? A simple sentence [Rait, I think I know why you thought it was compound. Let's see — what would be the second clause? "And found Victoria next to me"? Well, what's the subject of that clause? Right — it's not a clause because there is no subject. The sentence is a single, independent clause with a compound predicate. Fools me too, sometimes.] sporting a nonessential appositive and ending with a participial phrase.
We could talk about “hunched” and “humming,” too ["Is that alliteration or assonance, Mr. S?" "Hell if I know, George."], but let’s cut to what’s really important: how many characters does my opening sentence have? Those of you besotted by Twitter, a micro-blogging and social networking service, probably have already intuited that my first line is bumping up against 140 characters, counting spaces — the mandatory upper limit of a Twitter post, also called an “update” or a “tweet.” My first sentence has 139 characters, in fact. (A lot of us often write on Twitter like we’re playing a kind of linguistic blackjack: how close can I get to 140 characters without going over?)
I’m teaching diction and syntax with Twitter because micro-blogging helps writers focus on words and sentences.
Twitter has gotten so popular — it is currently growing at a 1,382 percent rate per year – that I think it’s inadvertently making people slightly better writers at the word and sentence level. Even those who use Twitter for more mundane and solipsistic purposes (and that would be just about everybody) (“Cloudy here. Just scratched my ass.”) sometimes feel pushed to improve their dribble to increase readership.
If you want people to follow you, diction and syntax are part of the equation even if you’re writing in fragments or very short sentences, as many Twitterers do. Randsinrepose, a popular blogger, cites The Elements of Style and gives his fellow Twitterers a lesson in diction and syntax in his post “The Art of the Tweet”:
In my head, I’m cutting words from my tweet to give you room to mentally add your own:
BEFORE: If it’s 4am, I know how stressed I am.
AFTER: Stress is how well I know 4am.
Nine to seven words. Slight reorganization, but which says more to you?
Twitter can be a godsend to the close reader as well as the writer. What if Dickens had serialized his novels on Twitter instead of in Harper’s or Master Humphrey’s Clock? He’d still be alive today, certainly, if he wanted to finish Bleak House. But, more importantly, what would his readership have been focused on with each installment, assuming they could have suffered having the plot so slowly torn from them?
Perhaps Dickens’s readers would have heard music in lines larger installments might not have slowed them down enough to notice. (Or maybe it’s simply the duty of a micro-blogging generation to slow reading down. My father heard his music at 78 rounds per minute; maybe I was meant to discover something different by hearing mine at 33 1/3.) Does a single sentence of Bleak House sing its own song? Here’s a sentence I found by clicking “surprise me” on the novel’s Amazon page:
Nor has he anything more to say or do, but to nod once in the same discourteous manner, and to say briefly, ‘You can go.’ (Bleak House 552)
The sentence’s two-letter words, monosyllabic words, and long vowels, combined with the first clause’s internal rhyme (which highlights the clause’s singsong meter), reinforce Mr. Tulkinghorn’s curt dismissal. How much of that did you catch in your college’s Victorian lit survey?
(Not all of Dickens’s sentences would fit on Twitter, of course. Amazon.com reports, though, that the average sentence in Bleak House has only a hundred characters. Even Faulkner, known for his page-long sentences, wrote Light in August at a 79-characters-per-sentence clip. 140 characters are all a ninth grader needs to begin focusing on writing at the sentence level.)
Teenagers loitering outside a sentence on Twitter can relate punctuation rules and basic syntax to their writing, and they can discover how grammar can sometimes foster creativity. Conformity to a form, even to an arbitrary form, can do that. And young writers can learn the art of breaking the rules once they have a handle on the basics.
Before I describe how I use Twitter in the classroom, I’ll give you a précis of my views on teaching syntax and punctuation.
Basic grammar and syntax are like common Western music scales: they are not important in themselves but for where they lead the practitioner once she has achieved some proficiency. Sticking with the form, for instance, I’ve practiced composing complex sentences ending with the subordinate clause and without commas separating the clauses. When one of my writers uses a comma in that situation, I ask myself: is he aware that he’s outside the form? And does he hear music I don’t hear?
Why learn and normally stick with the rules of punctuation and syntax? First, almost all of the rules make sense, even if you might have written them differently were you alive to write those popular grammars two hundred years ago. Second, most of the basic rules carry the force of public morality, so I can expect that my audience is aware of them and will judge me by how well I use them. Third, not having to interrupt myself and explain why I use a comma is as joyous as not having to stop and explain an allusion or a joke. An audience’s grasp of grammar, then, is as beneficial to a writer as its overall cultural literacy (to use E. D. Hirsch’s term).
Nevertheless, deviations from our current rules governing syntax sometimes sing. We hear the music better if we know the rules and understand the deviation as such, because such knowledge adds nuance. Nineteenth century American writers, for instance, often inserted commas before subordinate clauses, before sentence-ending prepositional phrases, and, as Lincoln does below, before the second part of a clause’s compound predicate. In a letter, Lincoln prefaced his reasons for allowing blacks to serve in the Federal Army with this:
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.
Though the last sentence’s comma isn’t kosher today, it’s expressive. To me, it draws out Lincoln’s response to slavery and creates a greater emotional distinction between thinking and feeling. Blame me if you get caught doing stuff like that.
I present syntax as a means of making music and improving clarity and concision, and I present punctuation as a means of varying syntax. I don’t teach punctuation for its own sake, so I don’t present all the comma rules (for instance) at once. To do so would disconnect commas from good writing. At least, that’s what happened when I tried it when I first started teaching. (Only recently in my career have my writers started to make considerable progress over my wife’s.)
A good teacher showed me how to present basic syntax using a tree analogy. Sentences that start with phrases or subordinate clauses are left-branch sentences. (E.g., “If it rains, it pours.”) If sentences end with phrases or subordinate clauses, they are right-branch sentences. Mid-branch sentences include appositive phrases and other interrupters. (“Esmeralda, my best friend and confidant, heard me snore.”)
Now that we’re ready again for Twitter, let’s make my writers members. It’s easy. They create a username and password, and they’re on. The only thing I do out of the ordinary is to have them check “Protect my updates” when they sign on for the first time so no one can follow them outside of our class. They then set up their sites — they love decorating them and selecting an icon — and make and accept invitations to follow one another.
After we play around with some left-branch sentences as a class and learn the punctuation rules associated with them, I ask my writers to write a left-branch sentence on Twitter employing some word — let’s use “waffle.” The arbitrary word works as a sentence-level writing prompt, and it creates enough excitement and maybe competition in the classroom to get the juices flowing. (My writers usually come up with better word prompts than I do.)
“You have forty-seven seconds,” I say. “Don’t worry: it’s just a draft.”
After they write and publish their sentences, I have them read one another’s work on Twitter. ”Pick two tweets to riff on,” I say.
In Twitter, if you mouse over a tweet, a “reply to” button appears, and if you click it, your next update will start with a link to the Twitter site of that tweet’s author. I have my writers use this button for only one purpose: to publish sentences created in response to other writers’ tweets.
I instruct my writers not to revise weak tweets. Instead, they are to create sentences in response to others’ sentences that inspire them. The resulting sentence may or may not bear an obvious resemblance to its stimulus because the second writer may have been inspired by one of any number of things, including the earlier sentence’s plot, rhythm, and structure.
This way, the first writer does not feel picked on. I am gratified that someone has been inspired by my sentence; I am not mortified that someone has corrected my sentence in front of my peers. If a writer finds a mistake in another’s writing, she is to send him a “direct message.” Twitter’s direct messages are private and are not shown with the updates that all of a writer’s followers can see.
I use a Promethean board — a brand of smart boards that help writing teachers focus on small portions of text — to display a Twitter site to the class in order to examine and celebrate some of the creations. We also “favorite” favorite sentences on Twitter by clicking the star that appears when we mouse over them. By doing that, a user sends a copy of the tweet in question to her “Favorites” page for all of her followers to admire.
You can imagine other directions an instructor could give a class of writers on Twitter to help them play with diction and syntax and learn punctuation and grammatical rules associated with particular sentence structures. (In fact, if you do, would you email them to me?)
I am loath to close (to employ Lincoln’s diction again). I was also going to develop here how obsessed writing teachers, such as my wife, can be and how the better ones often seem to labor in obscurity at the younger grades. I was also weighing an attempt at eliciting your pity for writing instructors in a sort of sub-plot, but I guess I’ll essay to do that over my long summer vacation.
Or maybe I’ll squeeze it all into a single, solipsistic tweet.
***
If you’re on Twitter, be sure to follow Peter’s highly poetic updates. Some of my favorites include:
Speak comfortably to the mulch, son of man. This summer, butterflies will rise from grasses like brown leaves to heaven. (Dec. 31st, 2008)
The grave at sunrise. The grave buried in snow. The grave in recession. The grave at war. (Jan. 27th)
Rabbit: I tend my fire in the sun. Snake: I am the sun. (Feb. 26th)
Dogma falls crisp as hoarfrost, but hormones open new worlds. (Apr. 8th)
Still to come in this series, I hope, are guest-written pieces on typewriters, hand-made books, Twaiku, Facebook update poetry, Second Life, and more. If you have an idea for an essay you’d like to contribute, let me know.
The last two days out on the bay I observe
the tundra swans leaving the flat horizon
of this water, arcing over tidal pools
and the inescapable prairies of marsh grass.
You are on your mountain to the north, closer
to their calls as they wing their way away
from this estuary that saves them each winter.
After so many months of shifting land, of rising
and falling tides, their heavy bodies must ache
for a release, a reprieve to our comings and goings,
whether by boat or air or, oddest of all, by car,
which looks nothing like the way these birds travel.
It’s the unyielding tundra where they will give
themselves over to their own desires. I suppose
most of us need the solid earth beneath our feet
as we choose a mate. The undulating waters
of our hearts make it hard enough to remember
which flyway to follow, let alone how to spend
those transitory days in the half-light of summer
brooding over what we’ve made between us.
Dear Dave,
What is life but fingers placed against blood’s rhythm,
some outward movement, the soul’s coming and going
like a kettle of kestrel that fly up against a ridge
and back out along its face? So much of this one life
goes to desire, the blue and orange feathers of our waking.
Migration is one way, following the ever-blooming, ever-
ripening path of the sun. Yet so much grief awaits—
whether we fly north or south, whether we settle ourselves
in the white-heat that roosts along the Gulf coast
or continue into the rainforest’s dark-green light.
The sun climbs out of the earth in the east and swims
across open water, while night’s westward stroke tugs us
into dream. Nothing travels in a straight line. That’s why
the moon returns each month, ascending the circle of its life,
then disappearing. Forgive me. I don’t want anything more
than this: the song of the goldfinch who comes to eat
of the cone flowers’ small dark seeds, its wisdom
in waiting out winter in one place.
I'm Dave Bonta, a poet and literary magazine editor from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
Order from the press or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
