speach tree

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 ...

text: how deep/ can this room grow as deep/ as deep as our voices/ as the Pacific/ and the words/ that wander and run into the walls like flies/ the fireflies,/ they rise up from the bog/ outside the Kaleidescope Room/ like spirits from their graves/ noting nothing/ after all they are not/ tourists falsh- ing shiny asses at the sun, / the moon/ and everything in between/ and meanwhile you/ and i we think of/ nothing, or anything, whichever/ you prefer because after all/ we are not fireflies/ and we can say/ whatever we can think of.

providence can be a brutal city, just like any other. in this glass box I watched the ocean fall in sheets outside computer clusters, braid inside the gutters. umbrellas made no difference. this is the version i actually ended up using: Providence can be and has been just as brutal as any other city in the country, but i was safe and desperately warm within the glass cage, watching the Atlantic fall in sheets, watching the acid rain braid itself into the gut- ters, wringing words like fair- trade coffee from my strained eyeballs to stain the imaginary page on my computer screen.

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...

This is one of the retreats that gave me some real strategies to take back home... For those of you who don't know about Kundiman go to kundiman.org! This is a revised version of what I submitted to the directors as a testimonial: Language is my homeland, and even this landscape is always moving and changing. The Kundiman Retreat was like an unexpected homecoming. Unexpected because I never knew I could feel so much connection, despite the initial awkwardness. At first, I felt a little “out of place,” and was self-conscious about the fact that I had only begun to really embrace poetry within the past two years. I never doubted that I was a poet, but I didn’t feel comfortable connecting with other, more experienced poets about the process of creating it. But on the second day, my workshop faculty member brought about a huge movement in how we related to each other. Myung Mi Kim found what connected the very different poetics in our workshop, while recognizing the very different expe...