As most of my regular readers know, I’m in a writing/teaching fellowship this week. I didn’t want you guys to miss out on Thursday Poem share, but I want to do a variation of poem share within my discussion of today’s summer institute events as well as my ongoing inquiry about what it is to be a writer.
We started the day reading and responding to poems in two voices. We’ve talked about that hear before but I was presented with some poems I wasn’t familiar with. You may be familiar with This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams, but I didn’t know about this response poem from Kenneth Koch.
Today’s warm up exercise was called Protector/Enemy. I am going to have to play with this one again! It was TOO funny. We were told to pick someone in the group to be our enemy and another to be our protector but they were not to know that we had to pick them. We then had to try to get as close to our protector as possible while getting as far from our enemy as possible. I wish I had taken video. HYSTERICAL.
There were two demos today. One that introduced us to Storify and several other tech pieces that help you make some digital stories. This was followed by another workshop on how to write into social action. A great unplanned pairing 
During another text working lunch for our own digital stories we came back to discuss different ways to handle writing groups. I have some new ideas!! Even learned some new ways to share and comment on google docs. And, some of you may not realize how much I love my Google docs.
I just met with my little internal writing group and they discussed my poem, which some of you have seen another version on. Feel free to discuss the new version. It’ll be up for a week. Of course. For those of you who participate in the poem sharing regularly feel free to comment on mine (or anything else I have discussed) and to post your poems. I’ll still take them down a week from now.
–I’m taking the poem down like I normally do! Thanks for your comments.
And then how about a funny poem called We Old Dudes which is a riff off of We Real Cool.
This was such a satisfying day, on so many fronts. I especially like thinking more about being creators versus consumers of what is around us. I am, however, a firm believer that we have to consume (to be part of what is around us) before we can also create. Maybe that ties in more to what I think a writer/literate personal should be. They should be able to “read” the world around them and then respond to it.
I’m posting just a bit earlier because my battery is dy……..
