speach tree

Just finished reading A Van Jordan's MACNOLIA (2004). I thought this was a useful critique by Tim Morris. I agree with him that the more interesting poems were the dictionary-definition format poems "to", "with", and "from." Though I am no formalist, I am warming up to using forms to teach poetry. I don't know if persona poetry is considered formal, but it usually gets people to write. But I digress. Below is a sestina that I want to use in a lesson, but I'll have to work out the lesson later - too tired at the moment. NB: 1. Fanny Brice, the longtime star of the Ziegfield Follies, was known for her talents as a comedienne as well as a singer. 2. Princess Tam Tam was a film starring Josephine Baker, produced in 1935. 3. "My Man" was a popular song written by Maurice Yvain as "Mon Homme." Later, the English version was written by Channing Pollock for the Ziegfield Follies. 4. Pepito was Josephine Baker's fiance from 1935...

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance: hummingbird morsels porcupine crave skitter pumps rush ponytail stem astringent sinister condensation dominate battle mushroom yum words that have lost favor with me recently: space feel syllable tail challenge script descent race class press guilt like futile suicide waterproof sorry I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana , the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji , Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji , based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as we...

This is a great writing activity that I learned from DW, but I’ve modified it a little bit so that it will be easier to use with my poetry students. (D, please feel free to post your own version or other versions you have heard of.) materials: lined paper tracing paper instructions: at the top of the sheet of lined paper, write Dear ___________ (fill in the blank with whatever. this will be your reader, your audience, and you will write a letter as if to _______________.) write a secret message to someone that you’ve been meaning to tell but never had the guts to do it. (1 – 2 sentences, but they don’t have to be full sentences). write it on the lined paper so that the message is scattered on the page but so that you can still read it top to bottom and left to right. now forget your secret message when the moderator begins to keep time, start writing and don’t stop. write anything you want but don’t stop, even if you get stuck. if you can’t think of anything, just write nonsense until ...

from kundiman: c/o Regie Cabico ! This exercise helps you work on your comic timing! stand around in a circle one person starts by clapping her/his hands once while looking into the next person's eyes the next person must "catch" the clap by looking into the clapper's eyes and clapping in time to the original clap the person who catches the clap must then turn around to face the next person in the circle to pass on the clap. to shake things up: clapping twice sends the clap back to the clapper. another one from Regie: stand in a circle and each person has to say a letter of the alphabet, but in 3 totally different ways with three different dramatizations. from summer camp: This exercise is sometimes called "A Big Wind Blows" but I think that name is totally dumb. So I call it "Revised Musical Chairs," or if that doesn't work, " Shout Outs ." One person is in the middle and says "I love all my peoples who..." Anyone in the ci...

a lot of these come from various anti-oppression workshops, but we just did these recently at the Free Minds Collective "Educator's Institute" - a 28-hour anti-oppression training for educators in the Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp 2007. the educators come from various backgrounds: me from brown u. and japan and suburban VA. WF (teaching bike repair with me and AS) from the Dominican Republic by way of the Bronx and now Greenbelt MD. Ms JM from 30+ years of teaching in the public school system. CC raised and educated almost entirely in Prince George's County... i would say that of the 30ish educators who attended the institute about 8 are college students at the University of Maryland, 9 are high school interns from the area, and maybe 9 or 10 are teachers who have been in the system for anywhere from 4 to 30+ years. Then there were a few random recruits from craigslist (the photography teacher, from El Salvador by way of FL) and other networks, like the...