Open Mic and Sound Reading

I'm looking forward to Sunday's open mic in Detroit organized by Sean Kilpatrick. This will be my first time reading/performing a poem outside of a classroom, which is an excellent opportunity to discuss Peter Quartermain's Sound Reading essay. How should we read a poem, how is a poem heard?

Despite conventional wisdom that a poem is best read by its writer, Quartermain argues this is not the case.

Wordsworth's Cumberland dialect -- which was provincial and specific to a limited group of people -- rhymed water with chatter, July with duly, according to Quartermain. Audience expectation also determines the success and nature of a performance. But should a poem be read in the dialect of the audience? What audience is so homogenic as to share a single dialect?

"Most of us manage our vowels with consistency and precision (or we suppose) but each of us manages them differently, and if we move into an unfamiliar dialect region we may find (as a result of our listening) that our vowels begin to slide all over the place," Quartermain writes.

Pronunciations are inconsistent -- even to a single reader. Since living in Michigan -- going on 10 months now -- I've notice my a's taking a provincial turn from their audible iteration in San Diego. Like many people, I've moved around so much my original accent -- central Louisiana -- is so over-layed with other influences it doesn't recognize itself. I don't sound like my childhood friends who stayed there.

These days, I'm picking up a Michigander intonation. Words such as that and fat -- I now catch myself stretching out my a's -- that becomes thyatt and fat becomes fyatt. My o's have taken on a high stretch. Words like Pop sound like phhhaaaap. The effect might be lost in translation here, and I don't meant to make fun. My point is that pronunciation is always slippery.

Now that poetry is printed on the page, there are other variables in play. The poem may have a visual rhyme scheme in similar spellings, where July and duly could work even if we don't hear them as rhyming.

"There is a wide and inevitable disparity between how we hear the poem when we read it silently, and how we sound it, saying it aloud; the poem performed in the head is an imagined poem int he world of sound," Quartermain says. "This may be why, when we voice the poem, we can never match what we breathe to what we think we hear."

I am notoriously poor at performing my poems in class -- and prefer them to be read by a competent reader who might bring his own and different interpretation of meter and annunciation. That to me is the best treat. When you work becomes new to even you!

Response to Lucy Lippard Lure of the Local

Lucy Lippard's piece Lure of the Local discusses how the narrative history of place personifies a place -- which is the aggregation of culture, nature and history.

You can't separate a place from its narrative history, which continues to be informed by people's intersections with it. We're constantly cross pollinating places moving from one to the other.

"Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all "local places" consist of, writes Lippard. "By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role.

Places are just as dynamic and organismic as people. This takes me on a slight tangent to another "place" where I spent a lot of time living. That's New Orleans. I lived there before the storm and near there during the event. When I returned afterwards, there was a period of rebuilding, which was as much about rebuilding damaged structures as rebuilding the narrative of the city. Deciding who was going to come back and who wasn't. Many newcomers arrived -- hispanic migrant workers because of all of the construction jobs, and pioneering artists and entrepreneurs that wanted to be part of its cultural recovery.

They all spoke about the unique vibe of New Orleans. The thing I kept returning to in my mind was -- that if so many people are not returning, what vibe is it these newcomers were sensing? Was it a vibe of architecture? Were there enough New Orleanians still around to share it or was it the vibe of the narrative of the city before the storm waiting to resume? For a while New Orleans was a ghost town -- its vibe was of abandonment and despair. These days six years later, it feels very much as it did before Katrina, except a little different. Less stagnant in some way. A lot of the driftwood has been shorn away. But there's still the palimpsest of identity that is comprised by a number of things: from buildings, to street names, to old homes, to people, to the creation legend of the city itself. However it changes, that deeper imprint of will always find a way to interact and interrogate its latest incarnation.

"The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand--our land, our place, the local. the lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies," says Lippard.

New Orleans is a cultural and artistic laboratory right now. It was completely emptied of people at one time and slowly repopulated with slightly different people who brought different stories to the city. Locals who returned had their own tales of woe. Much international attention has been focused on it too. All of this has created an outside narrative of New Orleans that has to influence life there and influence visitors' attitudes when they arrive.

That would be a great dissertation project to somehow -- without being too reductionist -- track the change in attitude and civic and social character with the change in narrative about the city. Maybe more of an artistic project. And I wonder what kind of tension is registered between the various narrative constructions and the various realities on the ground?

Calling an Audible

I just received word that the folks at 826Michigan are concerned that there are not enough good pieces by students for the book. This has been my concern as well. I received this email from the project coordinator yesterday.

"Amy and I met last week and went over lots of the pieces that have been submitted for the book. Both of us feel that a lot of the writing isn't up to the standard we'd like to see--this book is something that 826michigan as an organization needs to be able to fully stand behind. All of you have done an amazing job working with the students on editing, and have been really patient and wonderful even when the students have resisted the work. Most of the pieces that really reflect this work are the 2020 stories. Amy and I were thinking that we could use this Tuesday to gauge the students' energy levels/interest in the book, and to propose a new focus for the publication:

- using the 2020 stories as the main focus of the entire book. The publication would be centered around these pieces, as just about everyone has written one that's good enough to be published--or better. The theme of the book would be about looking toward the future, and how that connects to history, rather than attempting to create a straight up (alternative)-history textbook..
- since there are many suitable pieces in the other genres, the book would also feature a substantial appendix of "Further Readings." That way the students who *did* work to create many types of writing could be featured several times, and the most historically-focused writing could be used to support and inform the future/2020 theme."

Brenda Iijima on Language

Language poet Brenda Iijima measured the amount of garbage that arrived at the dump of her hometown of North Adams, Mass. in a single day.

She constructs her poetics out of the discarded. Likewise, language to her can be of equal permanence, the bones, rock and plastic of our experience.

She read from her works in Ypsilanti last month

I write this from scraps of borrowed unnumbered paper from that night. The felt marker bleeding outside of its appointed letters. Which seems to have some bearing on this project.

Her weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Poetry is the canvas, and the food, the expression, and the wholeness. It is the biological cataclysm when body and mind collide. Poof.

Here are some of the phrases I jotted down as she read:
Rabbit Pause
Pickled Gorillas.
Isn’t it perverse that there are less than 10,000 Polar Bears in the world, but it’s one of the most dominant, ubiquitous commercial images, especially in China?
Ham, the space chimp.

(My note: Brenda has a body of work coming out called: "Some Simple Things Said by and About," a chronicle of how humans have used animals as surrogates.)

Untimely death is wiggled out of the horizon.
Preservation -- from formaldehyde to land preservation -- is a problem.

We’re meant to be inter-relational.

Tone down, simplify.

Words can be dealt with on their own terms. There are words to disappear and words to call attention. Poetry is the saturated concentrated eventful modality of communication.

These are themes she returns to in her readings. "Language is a matrix" she says in Eco Language Reader. "Everything is pertinent to linage it is the impetus of language to pertain to the environment in interchange, nothing excluded."

Heady stuff. I believe what she's saying is that instead of merely being representational of objects in the world, language is the conduit (she uses the word conduit) between bodies to communicate and inter-relate. Inter-relate in this case is to communicate on an intellectual as well as sensual and perhaps spiritual level.

Utterances become bodily substance. It's becomes matter that the body sheds through words.

Brenda is also doing research on women who were murdered in North Adams during the 1970’s when she was growing up there. Here is a YouTube video of her performing a witch dance in North Happens.

Response to Hal Foster's Artist as Ethnographer

One of our readings this semester was by Hal Foster whose 1996 essay, "Artist as Ethnographer" criticized the practice of artists acting as quasi-anthropologists. He appears particularly concerned with site-specific art that acts in critique of its surroundings -- and often fails to truly digest its surroundings before forming its critique. Another problem is that site-specific art is often commissioned by the institution in which it attempts to critique.

Foster is working well beyond my range, but I found few of his points to be resonant. Artists who are marginalized socially and culturally -- by ethnicity or affluence -- are perceived as having automatic access to transformative "otherness". or access to "primal psychic and social processes from which the white bourgeois is blocked." In other words, we lack the street cred.

He argues that this "primitivistic fantasy" was exclusionary and limited Bataille's surrealism and Cesarie's Negritude movement.

Foster says post modern deconstruction has pushed art into the field of social anthropology. Such quasi-anthropological artists who seek to work with sited communities or institutions may have the bet motives and only partly want their work to be received as social outreach. (sarcasm intended)

The problem he says is that the representation of the surroundings are more often fitted into an artistic guise rather than the artist getting to know the surroundings.

Squeezing Water from Rocks

April 12, 3 hours and 15 minutes at Roberto Clemente Learning Development Center.

My project has not been exactly stellar in terms of the quality of output of my students. We've had to circle back. (Many were cutting and pasting information from wikkipedia for example.) Just getting them to turn in SOMETHING has been a challenge. The project coordinator sat down with the liaison with 826Michigan and came up with short essay for the students to write something about the present. A day in the life, or what a day at Roberto Clemente is like or the prompt: if I wish someone had told me this.... about high school.

The students had to write a half page by hand in order to receive a laptop and go to the library yesterday. A few of them hung back in the classroom particularly stumped about what to write. I sat with them trying to get them to think about anything. Not to censure themselves but just get their pen moving and allow the creative process to start. It was a mixed bag. By the end of the hour, the goal was get them to open a Google document and share it with the teacher so that they could go back and add to it.

These kids, not all but many, are clearly done with this project. Makes me worry about the book.

Where is their apathy coming from? Many don’t have relationship to books in general, which is one reason they're not connecting to the project. Others show so little motivation that people end up doing things for them. Many are kids from broken homes, often in poverty. Some of their parents are in jail or substance abuse problems. Over the course of the semester, I've realized that they are used to just being neglected. They assumed we would go away and take our book project with us.

We started out trying to get them to write imaginary versions of history. But many didn't know the original version. Then we had them write about an imaginary future.
In these essays they have very unrealistic views of what their future will be like.

I read an article recently by Malcolm Gladwell, I think, that said American kids for all their short-comings don’t lack self-esteem. In face, they tend to over-estimate their performances on tests when compared to their results. Whereas in South Korea and Japan, where secondary students test much higher than American kids, students underestimate their performance. American kids have a huge disconnect between their self-perception and objective measurements. This study suggests we might be giving them too much positive conditioning and not enough tough love. A little too simplistic but clearly expectations are low.

Case Study of Community Outreach at Cal State Monteray Bay

April 5, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

As Eastern Michigan Creative Writing looks to develop its community outreach program, one of the most impressive case studies I've seen and something we discussed this semester in the inaugural outreach class is at Cal State University at Monterey Bay.

Sited on the former army base of Ford Ord, closed in 1993, the university was founded on the core principles of service learning and community outreach based on an agreement reached with the local community that was losing 35,000 local soldiers and dependents.

In her article "Relationship, Reciprocity, Reclamation: The Arts at Cal State Monterey Bay," Jan Freya says consultants were brought in from several service learning movements to help articulate a core vision that created a campus uniquely suited to the region's needs.

The 22 page article impressively describes how this came to pass and how the service projects often lead to other unexpected collaborations between various departments and folks in the community.

I'm going to discuss only a couple here in broad strokes. Each fall, students in Gilbert Neri's digital public art class initiate a yearlong collaboration with a local community organization to develop a public art project. In 2003, they paired with the alternative Watsonville community school, whose students have behavioral and other learning difficulties. Most of them come from Latino farm worker families.

In the first semester, the Cal State Students worked on meeting the students and listening to their aesthetic issues and interests. They focused on building trust. In the second semester after all the interviewing, ice breakers and time spent with the high school students, they came together to start a digital art project.

In this case, the high school students wanted windows in their prison like building. With limited resources, they settled for an artistic answer to this. They worked with the college students in the digital art lab to create large scale images -- which acted as metaphorical windows.

That project led to a second project with teen moms at the school. The art students connected the teen moms to students in the humanities and communications department who helped them tell their stories and design scripts for a digital format like digital scrap-booking.

Other collaborations followed -- and I'm only giving a rough sketch here, but the point is that focusing many resources on a single mission led to a meaningful service learning project that helped the community and enabled Cal State students develop skills and pedagogy in their particular interest. The project-based learning engaged college students with the local community and shared common interests with people they might have other preconceived notions about.

We on the other hand were much more diffuse this semester on our projects. Most of us joined existing projects through nonprofits. Perhaps in the future -- and maybe not every time the class is offered -- the class might work as a single unit to tackle something in a unique way.

Incidentally, the writer of the piece, Jan Freya, also co-wrote the screenplay of the 80s break dancing classic: "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo."

An idea born from outreach

Proposal for Post New Narrative -- submitted April 12 for the &Now conference. This idea came from my experience in community outreach this semester and the work in Rob Halpern's class on cross genre from Prose Poetry to New Narrative.


Market pressures, fewer publishers and a declining appetite for confrontational and challenging works have pushed literary art to the margins of mainstream society. I also think we can embrace this.

We can use literary art to create a community in which it can be received, fostered and amplified. In this way, literary art remains alive and relevant.

I propose to compose and perform a cross-genre piece that will use new narrative techniques. as a means to create community. As a model, I am following the work of New Narrative writers Robert Glück and Bruce Boone who re-textualized the narrative of the gay experience in San Francisco in the 1980s. Their work speaks directly to creating and acknowledging a community of readers and participants within their story telling. They name names in their community and weave narratives around them. They also implicate and invite the reader into the community in various meta-text moves.

Modern literary artists must find new canvases that provide alternatives to market-driven channels. Our community should comprise part of our canvas. Literary art can do the work of creating community within its aesthetic. It can be instructive in how it can be experienced as well as sustained.

I am a graduate assistant in Eastern Michigan University’s MA creative writing program. My goal is to advance literary art in a society less and less hospitable for it. The commercial forces of publishing and media, and the corporate gospel of commodity culture are pushing art and artists aside. While commercial forces control their channels – we can intervene in real time and space.

We have started that process at Eastern Michigan where creative writing graduate students complete a required community outreach class. We spend at least three hours a week in the community developing a public art project such as a poetry workshop and competition or work with a nonprofit on an existing project. We attend a handful of graduate seminars during the semester responding to literary and artistic theory and case studies on community art projects. We keep a blog, give a multimedia presentation on our experience and write a final reflection paper. The idea is to encourage community building in the arts – to help develop our own creative practices within the context of building a “creative space” in the community.

Boone and Glück were concerned with redefining the gay narrative. They intervened in this narrative and reclaimed it. Their work synthesized intent and product. I think a similar way can be found here. Not only can we create communities in where art making is possible, but we can sustain these communities with the art itself.

My creative piece will be a hybrid form of critique and narrative that performs the work of community building around marginalized cultural production. The text will in both form and theme a manner in which artistic community can be built, advanced and embodied. My text will engage the reader both as an outsider and one who is implicated and invite the reader into the community.

Notes on Funk

In the 1980s performance artist Adrian Piper held a series of participatory social events where she taught white people how to dance to funk. She found that white people can indeed dance given the right approach, despite the disparaging cliche.

Piper understand dance and funk in particular as a language of interpersonal communication and self expression -- a medium of expression inaccessible to white culture. Social dance, she surmised, plays different roles in white culture than in black culture, according to her analysis and reflections about the project.

While social dance among whites is typically a spectator sport or a mark of social grace and achievement, among blacks it is a collective means of self-transcendence based on a system of symbols and patterns of movement.

In funk, she says, the movement must be experienced. So Piper arranged large-scale performances with 60 or more people. She introduced basic dance movements with their cultural references and their roles. She would break down the basic movements into their essentials so that the patterns were accessible.

Deeper into the exploration, she would add a quasi theoretical discussion about the relation of dance and music. The music would continue to play which allowed participants to listen and think while also respond to the to the melody and rhythmic qualities by dancing to it. They listened with their bodies, which was a major breakthrough. The dance became a collective, participatory activity.

Proposed Project Redoux

I'm re-posting this as an update to include references to Guy Debord's influence in finding a situational aesthetic. Rereading Debord's call for an intervention in urban continuity, I realized from my marked passages that I was writing from this influence without noting it below. So I've noted it.

For my ideal public art project, I would construct a carillon bell system that could be heard throughout an urban core. The bells would be installed either in an existing building or new construction depending on the location. Throughout the zone I would set up small pedestrian stations with a single button that activates the bells. Each station would activate a different song. If a song is playing, the station's request would simply be queued. I would also provide a manual keyboard at the bells to allow a player to perform pieces.

The different songs would provide an acoustic dialogue between people and neighborhoods of the zone. The bells would be loud enough to disrupt idle worrying -- but not encumber conversations or compromise pedestrian and traffic safety.

I think this project offers a hybrid of the permanent and ephemeral installations -- not a permanently visual interruption and more permanent than David Antin's skypoems. But I don't think it compromises the disruptive value of the aesthetic which I see as oppositional but not combative.

And as I said it borrows from Debord's situational aesthetic, specifically his unitary urbanism. "Unitary urbanism must control the acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of drink or food."

His idea was to create new forms through constraints -- much like a poetic aesthetic can be generated by constraints, such as Christian Bok's Eunoia or the French Oulipos who compose without certain vowels.

"It must take up the creation of new forms and the détournement of known forms of architecture and urbanism -- as well as the détournement of the old poetry and cinema."

He wanted to disrupt the commoditization of the individual and reclaim agency from cities that were built on the interests of capitalistic motives rather than humanistic or emotional motives.

My carillon bells would be in the initial zone. That would be my contribution. And then I would provide money to allow communities within a city to build upon the concept and add their own acoustical experiences. Here's how it would work. I would divide the city into geographic zones. Within each zone, place an acoustical device that could be heard throughout the zone. The zones would be drawn with acoustical principles in mind.

The residents and businesses of each zone could then come together and decide what kind of acoustical device or player to establish in their area with stations similar to the original one. They could erect a pipe organ, a symphonic orchestra or something else. I would leave it up to them. Through my "unlimited" funds, I would help them organize community meetings where individuals, agencies and other stakeholders could develop their vision and then apply for the funds to make it happen. Their projects would have to meet a loose set of parameters: that the acoustics be loud enough to be heard throughout the zone.

Let me go back to Debord here. His more radical version of unitary urbanism would create districts in various experimental cities -- each district would be able to lead to a precise harmony broken off from neighboring harmonies." Another colleague of his articulated trying to create a pure state of mind in each district that would induce a single emotion to which the subject would constantly expose herself.

Architecture would strive for atmospheric effects of rooms, corridors, streets, atmospheres linked to the behaviors they contain. Architecture would embrace "emotionally moving situations, more than emotionally moving forms" as its materials.

This far exceeds my modest proposal and perhaps for different purposes. But there is something to creating unique personal identities within urban areas which are more often known for their absence of the person -- the alienation of the individual and disruption of community.

Permanent versus Ephemeral in public art

I'd like to return to David Antin's essay, "Fine Furs," to explore public art as a specific form rather than theme or purpose. I've been exploring this general idea all semester in consideration of a potential public art project, as well as during my introduction in February of Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi Review of Books and language poet Barrett Watten who appeared for our BathHouse Reading Series event.
Typically, when we think of public art it's some kind of permanent installation that requires approval by various community stakeholders and bureaucratic layers of municipal government. That's especially true if it's in a public space or on a private space that's overseen by a historic district or redevelopment zone, or frankly anything that requires a permitting process for aesthetic consideration. Art installed on a public building is sometimes further scrutinized. What is the effect of having so many hands in the pot?

In his essay, "Fine Furs," David Antin describes his involvement in two kinds of public art projects -- both ephemeral and permanent. Both illustrate a case study in different receptions for art forms.

He arranged to write a poem in the sky above San Diego with bi-planes. The poem in his estimation would be, "a commercial that isn't selling."

He envisioned this to create an event followed by dialogue.

"I was counting on a certain randomness of interest among the onlookers. Some would know about the skypoem in advance and come to a certain viewing place where they'd be waiting for it, because they'd read about it or been invited. Some might drift in when they saw the others gathering. Some might happen to be looking u while they were walking on the beach or driving on the highway. Some might pick it up in the middle or at the end, and some might leave before the end because they had to or because they didn't care to stay. And I liked it that way."

The lines would read:

IF WE GET IT TOGETHER

(pause)

CAN THEY TAKE IT APART

(pause)

The poem required no permits or governments or citizen input, just money, which is not the case with permanent installations.

He was invited by a consultant in a Miami art in public spaces program to submit a proposal for a public installation at the Miami International Airport in 1985. His concept was to run an uncut newswire over monitors in a waiting area that was randomly interrupted with segments of poetry, one-liners and aphorisms, sometimes in English and sometimes Spanish. "My idea was that the news was something like an airport. Predictable in general and surprising in detail."

The work started in 1986. He secured approvals from the Associated Press for the newswire and then found a software program to perform the machinations of what he envisioned. He could have been the first poet in the world to have a maintenance contract with an airport, he said.

But getting clearance form the Miami airport's advisory boards and integrating it with the airport's master plan in concert with the Miami Art in Public Places program, unanswered letters, unanticipated costs, unanticipated collaborators assigned by the board -- and finally the project stalled and was killed.

What happened? It wasn't the costs, since the whole thing would have about $20,000 to $30,000. It was something else. It was the duration, Antin surmised in his essay. "It could have gone on for years, for as long as the Miami International Airport lasted, as long as the AP wire continued to transmit and phone company lines persisted in working. Skypoems are gone in twenty minutes. And this is the major point of most of the issues surrounding public art. Permanence."

No one really knows who the public is or what it wants or needs. There are many people who claim to act on the public's behalf. And no one is sure what space belongs to them, he says. Usually it's the space that's discarded and leftover. Rights of ways, parks, streets. There's so little of it, that any artwork on it is seriously debated by all constituencies. As Antin says: once something is going to be permanent everybody cares about it.

Using Community to Build Audience and Develop an Aesthetic

March 29, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

I am always interrogating the idea of what it means to be a creative writer today. I think it's important to consider one's role in the community. How can you create a space in which to work -- which will help you develop your vision and your writing practices. Outreach can help this effort, not only by helping to fertilize the intellectual desert that exists among young people, but also getting writers out of our cloisters and comfort zones. Frankly, sometimes we need a prompt.

Below is an interesting segment by Robert Glück from a class reading that speaks to this notion of community building. He's describing how he and Bruce Boone began to formulate what would become New Narrative in San Francisco.

"In 1976 I started volunteering in the non-profit bookstore Small Press Traffic and became co-director not long after. From 1977 to 1985, I ran a reading series and held free walk-in writing workshops at the store. The workshops became a kind of New Narrative laboratory attended by Michal Amnasan, Steve Abbott, Sam D'Allesandro, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, and many other writers whose works extend my own horizon. I would start by reading some piece of writing that interested me: Chaucer, Robert Smithson, Lydia Davis, Ivan Bunin, Jim Thompson, a book of London street games, Thomas Wyatt, Sei Shonagon. We were aspiring to an ideal of learning derived as much from Spicer and Duncan as from our contemporaries."

He later describes how that effort led to a "Left/Write Conference" that Bruce Boone and Steve Abbot mounted in 1981 at Noe Valley Ministry that brought together writers from disparate communities.

"We felt urgent about it, perhaps because we each belonged to such disparate groups. To our astonishment, 300 people attended Left/Write, so we accomplished on a civic stage what we were attempting in our writing, editing and curating: to mix groups and modes of discourse."

It's as if our external practices and dialogues can parallel often compliment our creative output on the page. I find that very interesting.

The Nitty Gritty

March 22: 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

Today, we went granular. Terry showed both classes a film on World War II while we four volunteers set up in the library. We each worked one-on-one with students to clean and edit their favorite pieces for publication in the "fake" history book. We also had them fill out a form with autobiographical details for an authors' section at the end of the book. We managed to sit with every student, although not all had a completely finished product. Most of the students are using their 2020 assignment where they speculate on life in the year 2020. Sadly, many have very unrealistic expectations of what their lives will be like.

A Case Study at Roberto Clemente

March 15, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

Keeping Students Focused

Our biggest challenge has been keeping the students focused on seeing their assignments through completion. They may write it, but not put it in Google Docs; or type it into the computer, but not share it. Or perhaps not do any of it. They had folders for their hard copy papers, but their assignments were still not getting done.

Logistics was the biggest issue of getting the assignments complete. The students, I think, found they could too easily slip through the cracks of accountability and goof off for an hour, listening to music on a laptop or just walking around and talking.

So last month we changed tactics a little and divided up the students by the four volunteers – about four students per volunteer. We sat down with our four students one on one, identified at least one assignment they wanted to see published and focused on getting that piece ready for publication.

Katie put this chart up on Google Docs. The colored squares are those pieces that have been submitted and then edited by a volunteer. The goal at the end of class was to color in a box. That seemed to work a little better. It empowered the volunteers to assume more responsibility in pushing the students more rather than waiting passively for students to come to us, which they were not doing.

Coming into the project in the middle of the year kept me a little in the dark in terms of visualizing the process of oversight. I was surprised at how little anyone seemed to care about the project. I think I was too light gloved with the kids, afraid of alienating them, when I think what they need is more accountability. They often leave the room in disarray, their laptops open, sometimes their personal folders still on their desk or even on the floor. The volunteers and teacher end up picking up after them. I think these kids need some discipline. They’re also rude sometimes to their very agreeable teacher.

They’re way too deficient in attention to be assigned laptops with Internet connectivity. And often they just end up cutting and pasting research from Wikipedia at the end of the hour. It’s very disheartening. One can easily feel overwhelmed, that it’s too late to reach these kids, and we need to start earlier.

Every quarter, the students are reassigned to different classes. And you can see how one or two bad actors can bring down the entire class.

I’ll see this project through to the end of the term and publication. And I’ll stay involved in 826Michigan. I think as an artist, you realize that your body of work doesn’t have to live only between the bindings of a book. That strikes me as a limited existence. Becoming involved in communities, a social volunteer community like 826Michigan, an alternative school community, a writer’s community in and outside the classroom – has been essential to helping to create an environment in which I can work and see myself as an artist – which isn’t defined by business cards and company flow charts – in fact it resists such delineation and prefers to operate on the margins.

I may be doing some good for the kids at Roberto Clemente, but I’m also forming my own consciousness as an artist, which will carry me onto future community outreach efforts.

Creative Space

March 8, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

I'm coming to understand the mantra that communities are essential to creative artists. The hermit hammering away at his posthumous masterpiece notwithstanding, many of us want to believe we not are writing into a vacuum. Being published is a wonderful affirmation. But what about feedback on work in process or a response that doesn't come with a 90 percent rejection rate? To the purist, there is certainly satisfaction in a well-written text lying on a hard drive, but what about bringing it into the light of a community? We don't live in a vacuum. Writing to a community helps keep us working.

The house reading, which is an honored tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, provides an informal space for writers and poets to share their work, explore creative practices and activate new ideas. Poet Rob Halpern, an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University who comes to us from San Francisco, held his inaugural Ypsilanti house reading Friday. SF poet Allie Warren, who read the night before at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and publisher Brian Whitener shared their recent work and held a conversation on taking the creative space into the community at large.

Rob had a full house of about 25-30 people from Eastern Michigan and Wayne State, who brought beer and wine and hors d'oeuvres. As a newcomer to Michigan and graduate student in literature and creative writing, finding a venue to discuss of all things literature and creative writing is a wonderful novelty. I'm heartened by the turnout and hope it continues.

Here are the bios on Allie and Brian that Rob sent out.

Alli Warren's chapbooks include Acting Out, Well-Meaning White Girl, and Cousins. Recent poems appear in Jacket, LUNGFULL!, and pax americana. Collaborative works can be found in ON: Contemporary Practice (with Suzanne Stein), con/crescent 2 (with Lauren Levin), and Bruised Dick (with Michael Nicoloff). From 2008-2010, she co-curated The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Alli lives in Oakland.

Brian Whitener works in project called Displaced Press. His most recent publication is a translation of Colectivo Situaciones Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks, 2010).

Poems by Alli Warren and Brian Whitener:

PLOW POSE

by Alli Warren

I feel like it’s a matter of economics
this rotgut wine
and bad lilt
it takes an industry of
experts, spreaders
their dual-purpose
for tillage and for trade
packing on the path
carting on the plain
who will account for
the kingdom is interested
in crossed high spears
is this the proper place
for oppositional defiant disorder?
that’s the second time this week
my mouth’s mouth
by turns inflated & empty
yanked on the latch to say
in the ether and the air
in the fire that produces things
the fairly specific things
you do with the left hand
a string of endeavors
and yawning and starting to rub
in the dark middle
in a package
in what is wet
in the tempo of circulation
so many relay points
from a single satellite
how I hold it up as an example
of joining through distortion
the bread is plentiful
and life unstrenuous
in bright array
honeycomb in the drone

from FALSE INTMIACY

by Brian Whitener

If I was no longer human, would
I finally see what it means to be
blank, or rather how to be a feminista in Exico, would I finally see that -scape that we, a Antigonean performance,
carefully placed little openings
in George Oppen, I mean fuck
it, they are a bunch of assholes,
that we which would be an affirmation, a non-autonomous autonomy, a skin, an autonomy not of people. Meaning: right now, there is no war. Which is what gives it its importance, as
a critique of landscape, I mean
as a critique of bourgeois landscape, I mean sex and
history do not mix,
my body is a
(possible)
enunciation, without
value, that is,
like an image
If it
is, I mean, true that there
is
no
war, that
is, there
is
no longer a war
no no longer a future from
which to access
If value, the body was not just
“mine” would I finally cease to
be “human,” that is without a future? without access? you
know, in all senses of the word
rather just a skin, full of exits?
What I mean to say is, you’re a language that disgusts me, I’m
thrust into a kind of metabolic, plastic revolt. You disgust me. This is a site-specific act.

An Accoustical Experience

March 1, logged 3 hours 15 minutes at Roberto Clemente

For my ideal public art project, I would construct an audible experience in an urban core. And then I would allow communities within a city to build upon it. Here's how it would work. I would divide the city into geographic zones. Within each zone, place an acoustical device that could be heard throughout the zone. The zones would be drawn with acoustical principles in mind.

I think this project offers a hybrid of the permanent and ephemeral installations -- not a permently visual interruption and more permanent than David Antin's skypoems. But I don't think it compromises the disruptive nature of the aesthetic -- which is oppositional but not combative.

In the first zone, I would install an carillon bell system either in an existing building or new construction depending on the location. Throughout the zone I would set up small pedestrian stations with a single button that activates the bells. They would play the song dedicated to that particular station. If a song is playing, the station's request would simply be queued. I would also provide a manual keyboard at the bells to allow a player to perform pieces.

That would be my contribution. The residents and businesses of each zone could then come together and decide what kind of acoustical device or player to establish in their area with stations similar to the original one. They could erect a pipe organ, a symphonic orchestra or something else. I would leave it up to them. Through my "unlimited" funds, I would help them organize community meetings where individuals, agencies and businesses could develop their vision and then apply for the funds to make it happen. Their projects would have to meet a loose set of parameters: that the acoustics be loud enough to be heard -- to disrupt idle worrying -- but not encumber conversations or compromise pedestrian and traffic safety.

Unabashed Succatash

Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007) imagines a heightened collision between the language of commercialism in a futuristic, globalized world. She read from the work on Thursday at the most recent BathHouse Reading Series event at Eastern Michigan University.

The poem sequence features a fictionalized dissident from South Korea -- turned tour guide -- who is leading a historian through an imagined futuristic city, called the Desert, which resembles in many ways the surreal commercialism of Las Vegas.

Her tour guide speaks in a pidgin assembled from English, Korean and other dialects that spit out cliches as if they were jingles written for the occasion, such as "unabashed Succotash" and "I get laid in me Escalade, then I drink Crystal before I take out my pistol."

The sequence of poems, which won the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize, bears a loose connection to Dante's Inferno, where Virgil guides the reader through the nine circles of Hell. This guide, instead, has on the surface sold her lyrical soul to commercialism as she touts in the language of commodities, musing on "Colgate white teeth" and her caveats for dating "even if them wining and dining me" as she leads her historian through a fictional hotels based on the cities of the world.

"Behold, the toilet!'

Hong reads without lights or special effects. Diminutive with a clear, melodious voice she riffs on commercials through the words of the guide who makes one nostalgic for the actual desert, a natural occurrence, in comparison to the commercial construction of the Desert in city.

The narrative of the historian (gender unspecified) is also interspersed throughout the collection, as he recollects his own experiences, including the Civil War in Sierra Leon, where it was safer to draw the city streets than to walk them. Though, he said, he was a poor illustrator. "Childish draftsmanship forced me to focus on smaller things," his says in a poetic primer than I put in my own pocket for later.

"les’ toast to bountiful gene pool, to intramarry couple breedim beige population!" a celebrant offers.

Hong also read from her forthcoming book that consists of a trilogy of poems -- from three imagined boom towns: an Old Western in the 19thy Century, Chengdu in president day China, and a cyberpunk city of the future.

From the first, she read three short sound poems, including two lipograms that relied on a single recurring vowel.

In the second, the narrator's boyfriend from Chengdu works in a Rembrandt replication factory, where he paints five fake Rembrandt's a day that are exported to a far off land called Florida.

The cyberpunk world is inhabited with "smart snow" which is nano-like computer dust that connects people without the need for computers. People can read others' thoughts and vacation by spelunking in another's mind.

Hong pulls from her own influences to sculpt her work in prose and verse. A former journalist, she tends to look to the world at large to inform her poetics. She spent a year in Korea interviewing defectors from North Korea in 2005. While there, she was amazed, she said, to find the Korean language so newly laden with English words, which was different from the Korean spoken by her own parents.

Still, in the bilingual household in California, she said, her family always spoke in broken sentences.

Reaching the Teenage Mind

Feb. 15, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

I'm getting a better handle of what I'm meant to be doing at Roberto Clemente. My residency is organized by 826Michigan, a volunteer outfit publishing a book written by U.S. history students in two of Terry Carpenter's classes. The deadline is approaching, but much remains to be done. 826Michigan had success last year publishing a book by students at Ypsilanti High School called, How to Rise.

That book was the culmination of a year's worth of writing workshops in a pair of 12th grade English classes at Ypsilanti High School featuring memoirs, poems and fiction.

There is a wider disconnect with this group. They don't seem to grasp what they're involved in. I can't tell where the problem lies -- a lack of direction or student motivation? Roberto Clemente is an alternative school for students who are disqualified from their zoned high schools. They lack the grades or maturity, or have been removed for behavior problems.

Terry Carpenter has about 30 students in two U.S. history classes working on the project. Each student will ideally contribute at least one piece -- either poetry, personal narrative, rap or something else. Students have had several writing assignments over the last few months with the book in mind.

His second period is demonstrably slower and less focused. But much time is wasted in both periods corralling students and getting them to settle down. Our presence on Tuesdays may contribute to that. We four volunteers are there to edit their work and offer some guidance on their writing. Each student has been assigned a folder to hold their writing drafts and is given a laptop. (more on that later.)

By March, student work should be in final editing with a project wrap in May. I set out yesterday with the focused intent to help them get at least one assignment completed and edited. Their past assignments include a letter home from the World War I trenches, something from the Civil War, a character monologue from the Harlem Renaissance, a letter from the year 2020, and two others I can't remember right now.

For each assignment, the students were supposed to start with a hand-written draft, then proceed to a typed copy uploaded to Google Docs. They were to have it peer edited, then edited by one of the volunteers, then 'shared' it on Google Docs with either Mr. Carpenter or Katie, the project coordinator.

Yesterday, Mr. Carpenter instructed them to finish at least one assignment and upload to Google Docs. He passed out a checklist for students to mark their progress.The checklist was an ambitious start. Peer editing was quickly discarded as a viable step.

In the first period, some students took the next step to type up a handwritten rough draft into Google Docs. I worked with one student in particular to get her report from the year 2020 typed, edited and uploaded to Google Docs for final consideration. Most of my attention focused on a single student to make this happen.

Other students cannot seem to grasp Google Docs or retrieve forgotten passwords. And the laptops they are provided are far too distracting. Many surf the web or listen to music sites instead of typing anything (particularly in the second period). Watching this process for the last four weeks has been frustrating.

In the second period, they were told to finish the Harlem monologues they've been working on the last three Tuesdays. Less than a third were working on assignments. Many were playing music or surfing the web on their MacBooks. When I circled the room asking if anyone needed help, I was shrugged off. One of the students told an 826Michigan volunteer to go stand over someone else's shoulder. It was clear, especially in the second period, that many students hadn't started on their monologues.

How do you instruct students who don't care whether their work is published in a book or whether they pass or fail?Some students sit idly, and you wonder how to reach them. Are they simply immature or is there some deeper pathology at work? Then, what is my role as a middle-class, white volunteer -- and what complications does my presence create?

Last week, I tried to encourage a student with her head on her desk to consider why Paul Robeson was important to the Harlem Renaissance. Not only was he stellar athlete, but he was a civil rights attorney, valedictorian of Tufts University and the first African American to argue before the Supreme Court. While I was talking to her, I noticed a tear stream down her cheek. Was I pushing too hard, was she mad at a boy, or is she just 15 years old and pissed?

Yesterday, I was sitting next to a student in the library who stared at her computer for about 10 minutes. She didn't know where her writing folder was, nor had she started on her assignment. After my second or third inquiry as to how she wanted to get started, she got up and left. I saw her later by herself writing in a notebook, which I guess is progress.

Many of the students disappeared periodically from the library. Some of them hadn't returned by the end of the hour, their computers still opened and I guess their work unsaved on their laptops. I'm not sure if they will not get credit or just another extension. Clearly, I'm not their teacher and don't have any long-term sense of who will respond to assignments, encouragement, grading penalties, etc. Some of these students probably want to get back on track and into their respective high schools. Yet that also raises the question of what about the rest. To that, I'm not sure if anyone has an answer.

What Kind of Public Art Would You Make?

February 8, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

I’m still working on a project idea with a simple thesis: If you had all the resources available to you, what kind of public art project would you construct?

I think one must consider first how art projects typically function in urban areas and how we might choose to improve upon or speak to this tradition. Should the project be planned or provide open parameters for spontaneous engagement? Is it a single piece or a guerrilla project that operates as a critique -- for example putting bubble thoughts over characters in commercial billboards.

Should the art involve its audience such as those projects described in Claire Bishop's essay on "relational aesthetics" in which participants give the installation meaning? In class we viewed some examples of relational aesthetics - for instance a piece that featured a two-part installation. In one room, phone booths allowed anyone to make a free call. In the other room, listening devices allowed people to eavesdrop on those calls.

Art such as flash mobs mentioned last week require not only people to view the 'mobs,' but have the added advantage of going viral on YouTube to allow a third layer of participation. What tools should be engaged? YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs – art that speaks to these tools and actually requires going viral in order to be “activated."

So the terms I think to consider are: how many people are involved, is the art a performance or a social experience that brings people together physically or through social media, is the participant a primary or secondary feature of the work, and in what kind of environment should the work operate.

I penciled some general principles last night. They may be too lofty and paradoxical to be practical, but here they are:

--The project would engage participants in the process of the art’s construction and give them a direct connection to it.

--It would take place in an urban landscape – to soften the landscape or make it more livable, inspirational or human.

--Engaging in children is always nice, but I think it also needs to reach adults, to re-activate inner joy. What is the joy? Not happiness, but energy of being alive in the moment; as a disruption from their projected schedules, to take them out of their minds and engage them in the moment. That is why it would need to be in a heavily trafficked area. I don’t know that it needs to be pretty, but it needs to be human. I watched Man on Wire recently, and the power of the tight-roper scaling across the World Trade Center was in that he reduced the grossly impossible down to human dimensions.

--It could be a performance piece, such as David Antin's skypoems, a beautification project or audible experience, such as carillon bells – like a button that plays bells high in a tower. I would want it to be secular in nature, but open to mystification and spirituality in that hope and transformation can be mystical or spiritual.

--It would have to be something that no one would do for profit, yet something that exhibits the intangible value of art that cannot be quantified through monetary exchange.

--It could be something that connects us to our ancient past, yet also instructs in the value of the present and future. Something that instills both nobility as well as lightness; that nobility is in living, that the time is now, and that we are at the same time part of an inheritance -- an unbroken line that we make of it what we can before gradually passing it on. Something that reminds us that we are so much more and less of what we think of ourselves, that we are connected to others in nearby towns and distant nations, and that we must earn greatness. That we are not entitled to anything.

It’s a paradoxical question of honoring our legacy and asserting ourselves.

Flash Mobs as a Function of Public Art

March 8, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

In consideration of the function of public art, here's a quick look at performance art in the form of Flash Mobs, which are groups of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse.

Flash Mobs would be an example of "relational aesthetics" that envelopes the viewer as part of the installation either in opposition or some other invitation for engagement explored in Claire Bishop's essay: "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics."

They often include singers who step out from the crowd to join a chorus
This event at the Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philadelphia was featured in the New York Times recently. It was sponsored by the Knight Foundation arts initiative.

A reporter for the newspaper was ready for the organized performance and watched the gradual effect of the flash mob on the oblivious crowd. No one at the emporium seemed to pay much mind when the sound of recorded music floated through the air. This man standing in line at a cheese steak stand raised his arm and turned to the crowd and sang “votre toast, je peux vous le rendre” in baritone. Another man leaped onto a table across the court and took up the second verse. He was joined by a third man, who had seemingly wandered in from the crowd.

And soon more than 30 members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia chorus were singing, dancing and toasting one another with coffee and soda cups.

Social media has greatly aided the organization of such events, such as Flashmob Detroit! on Facebook. Organizers will record the events and post the videos on YouTube, which sends them viral. However, once grassroots, Flash Mobs have been quickly appropriated by commercial interests and are now disseminated as viral marketing campaigns.

The Philadelphia Opera Company organized this Flash Mob at Macy's which was organized by the Knight Arts Program, begun last March by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

BathHouse Reading Series, Feb. 17 -- Cathy Park Hong

Please join for the next BathHouse Reading at 5:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 17, at the EMU Student Center Auditorium

Cathy Park Hong is the author of Translating Mo'um (Hanging Press, 2002) and Dance Dance Revolution (WW Norton, 2007), which was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Hong is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, andAmerican Letters & Commentary, among other journals. She has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, and Salon. She serves as a poetry editor for jubilatmagazine and is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Improvising at Clemente

February 1, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

The writing classes yesterday were shortened to make time for a documentary on racism to commemorate the first day of Black History Month. We didn’t get much accomplished on the writing project with so little time. The students were either continuing their letters from the World War I trenches, or they started researching a figure of the Harlem Renaissance for a one minute presentation at some future point in front of the student body.

The students were working in a very small computer lab because the library was unavailable for some reason.

At the end of the period, I walked with the instructor back to his normal classroom. He asked me if I wanted to hang around and give his World History students a brief presentation on the events happening in Egypt while he retrieved something left behind in the computer room. I’ll tell them you’re a news specialist, he said.

He introduced me as the guest speaker. I greeted the students, took my jacket off, and led a 10-minute talk about the protests in Egypt. They knew the location of the country on the map as well as the historic importance of the Egyptian civilization. We talked about Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, as well as the tension between Israel and the rest of the countries in the Middle East. We also talked about the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who signed the Camp David Peace Accord with Israel, and the ascension of Mubarak 30 years ago. You can understand why the people would want a new president after 30 years, I explained, as well as nervousness of some world leaders about whether a new regime would recognize Egypt’s peace treaties. The U.S. promotes democracies in theory, but sometimes as in the case of Egypt, the U.S. prefers regional stability. (Something to that effect.) Now, when you go home today and hear about the protests on the news, you’ll have an idea of what it’s about, I said.

It was definitely improvisational and kind of fun. I thanked them for letting me talk to them, and stayed for the World History Lesson on the Mongolian invasion of Kiev-Russia.

The Role of Public Art

What does it mean when we say "public art?" Usually we know it as a sculpture or some other design approved by a committee that managed not to offend anyone. Of course, art that doesn't offend anyone may not do much of anything.

How we define public art as well as its role in the public space is a broad question that we are considering all semester in Creative Communities (a name I prefer to CRTW 550).

Two visiting writers presented their own perspectives on the topic at a Jan. 18 BathHouse Reading event at Eastern Michigan. Eric Lorberer, who is the editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books in Minneapolis, enlightened us through a virtual tour over "Ashbery Bridge" in Minneapolis. And Barrett Watten, a professor at Wayne State University and one of the founding theorists on the Language School of Poetry, discussed physical projects that incorporate poetic texts in their space.

I had the privilege of introducing both speakers. (link).

Ashbery Bridge is the moniker given to the pedestrian bridge best known for an untitled poem by the American poet, John Ashbery, adorning its trellis. The bridge was designed by Siah Armanjani, who commissioned Ashbery to write the poem. Intended for pedestrians, the poem is viewed walking across the bridge in a single fragmented line. As Mr. Lorberer explained, it requires the user of the bridge to activate the experience.

It is also an example of "Relational Aesthetics," whereby a work of art is only realized through participation of its audience.

The designer, Iranian-born Armajani, is best known for designing the Olympic Torch presiding at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and includes texts and poems in all of his projects.

Ashbery Bridge traverses 16 lanes of traffic and connects Loring Park to the Minneapolis Sculptor Garden. It was constructed by workers in the Transportation Authority.

"It presents poetry in a revolutionary way, and focuses us off the paradigm of the page," said Lorberer.

The poem is physically encountered at the top of the 38 steps of the bridge. The air is different, the traffic noise changes. The free verse text is fragmented in clusters of short clauses separated in spaces between support beams. It's lack of a title is crucial, says Lorberer.

Without a title, the poem also resists being announced or contained, he says. And it allowed Armajani to break it up as he saw fit.

Text appears on both ends of the bridge so that a walker will engage with it coming and going. Poetry in this physical context adds textuality to experience. It is experienced differently off the page and in real time.

The poem in its entirety:

"And now I cannot remember how I would have had it.
It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order: The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all,
where you stand and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and places you
where you always wanted to be.
This far.
It is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence, small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool."

Sometimes languages and images complement a structure, such as Ashbery bridge, or they oppose or clash with a physical structure, which invites an "interrogation" of physical space, explained Dr. Watten.

Language itself takes on its own unique visual properties, such as unbroken blocks of text that disorient viewers or texts arranged in various shapes to mimic geometrical figures.

"A Heap of Language" by Robert Smithson

For instance, Dr. Watten's pieces entitled, "Non Event I", "Non Event II", Non Event III," and Non Event IV" show language that resists any kind of structure and seems to be in fact running away from structure. Pairing this with a building -- an image of stability -- offers a commentary on product design, he said.

Part of effort by language poets is to re-contextualize language from representational to a primary engagement.

The modernist poet Laura Riding Jackson attempted to formulate a new dictionary that organized words not by their definition but rather their "rational meaning." This is a project she dedicated her life towards, but never completed. Her simple home was moved to an ecological preserve where Dr. Watten held poetry workshops on rational meaning. Throughout the structure of the home, he pinned words from her dictionary, meant to re-imagine the essence of words through different contexts.

Think of these as a bridge to make poetry experiential, he said.

First Day at Clemente

Jan. 25, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

Clemente Learning Development Center has about 100 students originally from schools all over the Ann Arbor - Ypsilanti area. Each class has 15 students, who are not divided by grades. I assisted in two periods of Terry Carpenter's history class with three other 826Michigan volunteers.

The students' long-term project is to write an imagined history textbook. Terry has two periods of students working on this project on Tuesday's with volunteers.

Some of the students at Clemente

Katie, the 826 volunteer coordinator, is funded through Americorps.

In each period, Terry started off with a short introduction and examples on propaganda posters that were designed to generate homeland support for World War I. He also had students read letters home from soldiers on the horrors -- and rats -- of life in the trenches.

Students had the option of creating their own propaganda posters (from images they cut from magazines) or writing imagined letters from the front. In the first period, I worked with students on their letters in the library, and in the second period, I worked with those on posters.

The two periods couldn't have been more different. As Terry explained, the second period students would be much more disruptive with about half of them in special education. Getting them to focus at all was particularly problematic. Yet he soldiered on, going over the material and resisting kicking anyone out of the class. A third of the students in that period simply went to sleep or refused to engage in the project.

Those in the first period were surprisingly engaged in their letters. Though chatty as teenagers will be, they participated in some fashion. Obviously, some wrote longer with more focus than others. The girls interestingly, decided to come at the project not as a soldier but the spouse at home. One wrote an epistolary exchange between husband and wife, who was a nurse in a hospital for wounded veterans. From returning soldiers, the wife was getting information that her husband censored form his letters, a very original idea I thought.

I felt like I offered some contribution, not through editing, but helping students work through their approach to the writing. Broad brush stuff.

Some notes:

Several of the students were football players from their respective high schools and are allowed to stay on their teams even while attending Clemente.

Clemente does not issue diplomas. Seniors who 'graduate' receive diplomas from their respective high schools.

The Handbook

Here is the handbook forwarded to me by 826Michigan's volunteer coordinator.

Working with Students:

Our number one priority when working with students is always to give them our full and undivided attention. In the average classroom, there is one teacher for thirty students, so it is very important to make sure any students you’re working with feel like they are in the spotlight. Let them know that all their ideas are good ideas by listening intently and encouraging them.

Things to Keep in Mind Generally

• Start with HOC—higher order concerns—such as organization, ideas, themes, arguments, overall structure, and move into LOC—lower order concerns—such as grammar and punctuation, if you have time.
• Ask lots of questions. Try to let the student work through problems on his or her own. You are the embodiment of extra support and guidance, not the manifestation of easy answers.
• Make sure the student feels ownership over his or her project. If you’re working on something that’s already written, always ask permission to look at it; never grab a paper out of a student’s hands–that’s rude.
• Look for patterns. If you notice a student doesn’t seem to understand how to properly use commas, gently point it out. Give examples—from the paper—of the correct way, and then let the student try.

Things to Keep in Mind When Teaching Writing

• When working on a writing project, the most important thing is to be positive. Point out places where you want more detail, or an idea they could expand upon. Point out specific parts that you love.
• Ask questions! What does the student like about the piece? What else would you like to know? Do they have any concerns? What could be favorably described as “neat?”
• If a student is stumped, recap the story thus far, and then ask an open ended question: “So they’re trapped in the dungeon, the sun is starting to set, and Cadwaladder’s hands are sweating profusely …what do you think happens next?”

The Unbelievable and Awe-Inspiring 826 Finger Trick!

Each teacher has his or her own way of quieting excited students: some use the quiet coyote, some use some weird rhyme that we can’t remember. Here at 826, we have the Unbelievable and Awe-Inspiring 826 Finger Trick! This takes years to master, but you can get pretty good at it with some concentrated practice.
Basically, you hold up eight fingers, then switch to two fingers, and then switch to six fingers. Do this over and over and fast as you can without having an aneurism. You can make those numbers happen with any combination of fingers. See? It takes a lot of concentration. Do you think you could do that and talk at the same time? Do you think a student would be able to?

First Mark on the Canvas

This is the first entry for my Community Outreach project for Eastern Michigan's Creative Writing program. I've established contact with Michigan826 -- a volunteer organization that runs a stable of service projects in schools in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. My assignment is at Roberto Clemente High School, which is a place for teens that have had trouble adapting for whatever reason to their zoned high school. I'm told I'll be helping students with articles for Clemente's in-school publication. My first day is next Tuesday, 1/25. I'll work on-site for a half-day each week.