Word Play – My Final Project for ECMP 355 (Part 1)
Man With Wooden Leg Escapes Prison
Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught.
They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day
he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river
to get to the field where he must work all day
on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas
Party they gave him back his leg. Now he doesn’t
want it. His escape is all planned. It requires
only one leg.
~James Tate
My final project was shaped around a classroom mentorship working with Jared Nichol and his grade 9 ELA class in Cold Lake, AB. Jared’s class was about to begin a unit on poetry that would carry them to the end of the year. Now, I can’t speak for anyone else out there, but for me learning about poetry in high school was like taking a sleeping pill and not waking up for about six weeks. It was the driest, most flavorless experience for me – I was subjected to hours upon hours of structure and language analysis; forced to sit, alone, and pontificate about the meaning and intent of a stream of male poets who had been dead so long even the best CSI’s couldn’t extract a DNA strain from the dust of their bones. Ugh!
This is not how I relate to poetry. THIS is how I relate to poetry:
It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and going to open mic nights that I really realized what poetry could do for me, or what it meant to me, or how I needed it in my life.
You all know I am a big word nerd, a drama queen, a voice to be reckoned with (at least that’s what my mama told me), and an aggressive mother hen. I believe poetry, like music, like theatre, like all revolutionary art forms has the power to change lives and help us to understand humanity and our relationship and purpose in the world. I believe poetry has no meaning until it means something to you. Not everyone’s gonna love the vivid and timeless imagery of Robert Frost. Finding a personal relationship to poetry is like looking for a new car, or buying the perfect-fitting pair of jeans: you gotta shop around a while before you can zero in on what you really want from written and spoken word.
I got really excited about working with Jared and his class on this unit. I thought – how can I make this experience different from the ones I had in school? Lucky for me I have some creative and well connected friends in the Arts Ed. faculty. The Lioness Leigh was the one who first introduced me to the HBO special – Brave New Voices, a documentary that follows several teams of youth slam poets in several states in the U.S. as they compete in the Brave New Voices slam poetry competition. I was blown away by the power, truth, vulnerability and raw emotion that these kids poured out on stages across the U.S. This was my jumping off point.
I started building my arsenal – arming myself with all of the good poems I had read or seen or felt or heard that touched some part of me. I launched myself into a voicethread project, reading a poem called Holy by a New York poet named Nicole Blackman. I started building a Glogster page that would bleed my love of poetry all over the computer screen. I started talking to Bert…
Bert has these friends…these two good ‘ol pals he knows from Moose Jaw, two dudes who just happen to write and perform two vastly different forms of poetry. These two dudes just happen to be in town at the same time. I couldn’t believe the timing and the luck! Patrick Swan is a slam poet, and Daniel S. Tysdal is a published poet, author and lecturer at the University of Toronto. Let’s get these two guys together and get some Grade 9 students to ask them questions about their work as poets! Better yet! Let’s film it and post it on YouTube!
This was no easy feat my friends! I do not own a camera, and I have no editing software on my second hand, last legs laptop. The project was built with borrowed technology. The camera was borrowed from my sister, and the editing was done in imovie on her mac. I love macs. I have been converted. It was almost too bloody easy to get the video uploaded, cut up into segents, insert some title cards, music, and quick dissolve transitions, and upload it to YouTube. It took me about six hours for the whole process from start (teaching myself how to navigate it), to the final process of uploading the vids to YouTube.
I loved every moment of this project and I will continue to use movie making and YouTube in my classroom as an educational tool, and as a means to share with anyone else out there who wants to see it.
Here and now, right before your very eyes, are the fruits of mine and Bert’s labor:
