Borderland

A couple of ideas appeared in my email today in advance of National Poetry Month. I now have a poetry resources list for the sites I found potentially useful. While following links for those poetry sites I ran across Altered Books. Remixing digital media has been popular among artists for a long time, but I’ve never seen anyone tear a book up to change it into something else. I plan to visit the local used book store and buy a box full of old kiddie lit paperbacks and have the kids rip and mix them. It’s found poetry, but you find it by taking words out of the book, or layering new words or pictures onto the book. Take that, publishers! Your paperbacks all fall apart sooner or later anyway. We have power over any text. No reason to limit ourselves to magazines and newspapers.

In Writing Across and Against the Curriculum, Art Young described the benefits of using poetry in writing for all academic disciplines.

I found that when students write poetry in response to a specific assignment carefully constructed to fulfill a course goal, under the tutelage of an encouraging teacher who makes students feel “safe” as they compose and share, most authors do express fresh perspectives on disciplinary knowledge and develop better understanding of multiple purposes, connections, and contexts for that knowledge….When poems are assigned as brief, informal, writing-to-learn activities, students are free to spend as much time writing them as they wish…In writing poetry students write outside the discourse of the discipline; at the same time, they often make connections to the discipline not typically available when they attempt to follow the discipline’s rhetorical conventions. Usually they are being graded on how well they follow those conventions and how quickly they learn the discourse of an insider. Writing poems across the curriculum interrupts their expectations for disciplinary writing and thinking; for many poets it loosens the requirement to think inside the curriculum. Using the writing of poetry as a tool for learning should not be an esoteric activity but, rather, an important strategy for enhancing student learning and influencing campus culture.

Young, Art. “Writing Across and Against the Curriculum.” College Composition and Communication 54.3 (February 2003): 472–485.
Update: Art Young has a book that is available online called Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, Third Edition.

Mess around. Mix it up. Celebrate poetry with writing “across and against the curriculum.” Have fun with transmediation.