Activities
Day 1:
Remember to begin each class period or workshop with visual aids of examples of each project: each student should be able to picture where they are headed each day, such as this Google image: htmlgiant.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/09-Tzara-result.jpg (for today).
Start this unit with a Tristan Tzara Dadaist cut-up poem, using a collection of at least 25 strips of words (as large as possible) from a newspaper or magazine. Make sure you use a healthy mix of nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, etc., and depending upon the literacy level of your students, you can teach the parts of speech to them as you go ahead with the collage, as well as what a typical sentence in English should contain. I'd say start small and shoot for creating a sentence or headline-type-phrase, but it needn't make perfect sense; a little of the illogical can be surprisingly interesting. Toss the collection of words in a container of some sort and scatter them on a desk, the floor, or a piece of paper. Space them out so they can be read (and you can do this several times until you find one that works for you, but the main point is to wind up with something you never would have created had there not been the element of chance. The working moral here is to "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty", as a bumper sticker once proclaimed to me on my way home from work; teach students of this process, and moreover, to value acts of chance as serendipitous, and essential.
Have students do the same as you have demonstrated, and ultimately have them paste, glue, stick, tape down the results to a piece of paper (picking out different colors can be fun at any age!) Challenge your students to construct whole pages of "writing" using as many words and combinations of words as possible.
Day 2:
Today's class is oriented around typography; just as students had arranged the words onto a page, students here are starting to think about the big picture, as well as content. For instance, if yesterday was concerned with chance and randomness, today it is geared towards composition of those very words. Students can begin with a conventional poem they have already written, cutting out the words and rearranging them onto the page with intriguing patterns: new stanzas, dangling participles (literally), and dropped lines through enjambment. After an initial visual demonstration, set students forward focused upon remaking their old poems anew: How can it become a different poem, even with the same words? Furthermore, students can try to make the shape of the poem follow the subject of the poem, so that physical form mirrors content. For example, if one is writing about a swan, write about it in the shape of a swan; if it is about love, a heart; one student wrote an ode to his phone in the shape of a phone, with words forming the strings of the headphones. See some examples of "Typography" or "Concrete Poems" on Google images. Here is the address for the swan: nynkepassi.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/swan.gif. As a closing exit ticket, ask students if the act of form mirroring content is a gimmick or an important poetic act, and why? Have them pick a side and write briefly (I like to play the activity as a kind of game: "Write 25 words exactly!" so they have to make critical decisions about what words to leave in, and which words to leave out.)
Day 3:
So far, students in this unit have been constructing poems from an assortment of words; in this day's activity students will deconstruct a page of words in order to reveal a set of words that can be called poetry. Technically, this is a subtractive process called "redaction", and there are a lot of terrific examples in the newish book Newspaper Blackout, also found online by searching Google images for "newspaper blackout poems". These can begin with simply crossing out words, then advance to trying to make a sort of sense from what remains; this can become a fine art, in that students can attempt to find haiku, rhyming words, and even challenge themselves to reinvent the actual story by eliminating any words that tie to its original theme or message, while still maintaining a cohesive story. Another way this game with words on the page can be played is by having each student circle words he/she especially likes, then use markers to redact the rest. Critical decisions must be made around content, diction/word choice, and style.
Day 4:
Having broken the ice with the first three days' activities, students can begin to synthesize thinking about the work being done into a more theoretical direction, and approach the process with a set of poetic eyes. Ask students a series of probing questions: What was your process? How is your approach unique? If a Jean Arp collage poem will always be unique to Jean Arp, or a redaction poem be particular to Austin Cleon, and a chance poem always bear the distinguishing choices of Tristan Tzara, do you think this work can be used to express a unique identity? Why? Why not? Read to them or better yet provide descriptions of some works by Kenneth Goldsmith to them: How is his work unique to him? (You can listen to an interview with him here, beginning around 21 minutes in: www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/1664.) Next, for homework, have every student look for a "found poem", or if there is time during the period, and the climate allows it, send them out into the building to find collections of words that form a type of poetry by themselves. One fellow in my formative seminar at Yale University found a poem in the construction messages of signs around the University; another fellow found a poem in an Olive Garden menu's description of their mission statement; still yet another fellow found a poem in a series of texts from a disgruntled wife, whose husband had been reticent in his husbandly duties! Have students begin to see the world as a series of random yet meaningful combinations of words in our experiences. Emphasis here is upon the act of framing some words as your own, and also framing them as poetry. Remember that Kenneth Goldsmith once said, "There's just decisions and no creativity". 30
Days 5 & 6:
Now it's time to begin combining methods to create a larger scale project: depending upon the age of your students, purchase or collect appropriate hardcover books for this stage ahead of time; magazines can serve a similar purpose, if they are of a durable variety. I like children's books, for elementary school aged kids, and any hardbound books for every other age (old school textbooks can be great, but follow your bliss!). Students may now apply layers to their work, building with collage for visual as well as verbal purposes. Let them go hog-wild! Make sure you have enough materials-scissors, glue-sticks, tape, magazines with colorful images and typefaces or the wherewithal to print out images to meet every student's wildest imagination with the means to express it artistically and poetically. This can be a long process, if you let it become one, so keep it lively, with constant celebrations of student examples to be displayed to others as models of innovation from which others might learn. Attempt at most 5-10 pages at first, gluing pages within each book together to make them more substantial and grandiose, or go whole-hog and applaud them for making an entire book a one of a kind, original work of art. I believe it is most important to have a finished project/book at the end of the unit, and ideally everyone will have tried each method at least once and had fun to boot; they may have even learned something.
Day 7
In the final day of the unit (depending upon how much time is spent upon the book project, which could be an ongoing activity) students will take time to reflect upon their work. Is this art or is this poetry? Students should argue a side of this issue in an essay of some sort (anywhere from a single paragraph to a 5 paragraph essay, depending upon how much you want to get into it). A few suggestions on how this can be structured: have students model their essay upon the arguments in an essay against Kenneth Goldsmith, here: tedhashberryman.com/2013/10/15/kenneth-goldsmith-is-a-hoax-or-fifteen-conceptual-poetry-projects-better-than-printing-the-internet/. Alternatively, they could read any number of entries at ubuweb (www.ubu.com), but in particular the beginning 3-4 paragraphs of Moving Information: On Kenneth Goldsmith's The Weather, by Marjorie Perloff at: www.ubu.com/papers/kg_ol_perloff.html. All these generally support the arguments put forth by Goldsmith, et al, and the contemporary thrust of Conceptual poets (as they have defined themselves by participation on this website).
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