Glogster Allows for Live Reading by Beat Poets

Glogster is a great tool and fun to use. It allowed me to gather several poets in one spot for a live reading. Of course, this isn't really possible but after a little searching on YouTube I was able to find three of the most important poets of the San Francisco Renaissance reading their works and put them together on Glogster.

This Glog will be posted to the class blog a day or two before a unit on the Beat Movement begins and the students will view it before coming to class. Upon arriving in class students will be asked to share their thoughts and impressions, so far of the Beat poets. Students will have copies of one or more of the poems and the poems will be read aloud as a group. Then students will have a chance to read the same poems silently. There will be a discussion of the difference between hearing a poem and reading a poem. The importance of live reading for the Beats will be discussed and the role it played in the Beat Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance.

Quicksand Assignment

Big Question: What is the role of clothing and appearance in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand?

Now that we’ve read Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and discussed it in class, I’d like you to take a look at one of the big questions posed by this text. As Helga moves from one place to another her wardrobe changes. Choose one of these places and focus on Helga’s clothing, accessories, and appearance as she tries to find her place in her new home. What do her clothes tell us about Helga at the time or the people around her? How much choice does Helga have in deciding what to wear? Who or what drives the clothing choices made by Helga? These are just sample questions that you might address to answer the big question. Write a three to five page paper on the role of clothing in Quicksand and use the text to support your argument. Post the paper on your blog and link it to your Glog.

Create a Glog to introduce the reader of your paper to Helga in the location you chose to explore. Find images, video, and audio that bring Miss Crane to life. Include at least two quotations from the text to explain items you’ve included on your Glog.

As an example, here’s a Glog from last semester that was created as an introduction to a discussion about the debate or theme of Uplift and the Harlem Renaissance.

Glog part 2

Created a Glog with my group in class today so my rough draft may be my final copy. I added a W.E.B. DuBois Wikipedia link on his photo. I sent the Glog to a friend and he tells me it works but the e-mail he received looked very suspicious and from my end there was no way to edit it before it went out. Here's what he got:

From: "Angela"
Date: November 3, 2009 8:32:56 PM PST
To:
Subject: Take a look at this

Hi,

I thought you'd like this:
Click here

Angela

Crazy, huh?

Well, here's my Glog:

Glog

A walk through the cemetery with Walt

This post is my response to the Whitman assignment Christine posted on her blog, found here.

I think this a well-written and clear assignment. Christine treats the poem, the subject and her students with respect. Perhaps respect seems like an odd word choice but I think that it is very fitting. Christine has isolated a small but key part of “Song of Myself” that reflects on a visit to a cemetery. It might be tempting to bring up the scary or Goth images of a cemetery but like Whitman she treats this setting with respect. Whitman has found beauty and romance in “uncut hair of graves” and the assignment uses a similar approach to bring the student into an early part of the poem.

The first part of the assignment asks the students to write freely in their journals about their immediate response to the poem. This is a great way to get students started on an essay. When I did this part of the assignment I found that I was able to address several things that were on my mind after reading the fourteen or so assigned lines of the poem. I always struggle with how and where to begin an essay so having this step outlined for me in the writing process was very helpful. Having a chance to work this through in a journal entry will make starting an essay much easier.

JOURNAL ENTRY:

Reflections on a short passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855)

This is a tricky passage for me to focus on because to find it chosen for me out all the possibilities in this work, took my breath away. For as long as I can remember I have been intrigued by cemeteries … the living, the dead, the art, the silence, the pageantry, the emptiness, and on and on. So much can be found and experienced in a cemetery. I have many favorite cemeteries and like to visit them regularly. I also explore and photograph cemeteries when I’m in a new place. When I was a child I would beg my parents to drive through the cemetery on the way home from church. But enough about me, what about the poem?

I can see the child in the first line running around the cemetery, not really understanding where he is; for him it is just another place to play and explore. Hands full of grass from a grave he wonders “What is the grass?” Perhaps he has never seen grass and doesn’t know the word for it but to an adult who has a different understanding of this place the innocent question seems to be asking for so much more than a botany lesson. The images Whitman gives us are lovely (“handkerchief of the Lord”), beautiful (“a scented gift”), mysterious (“hieroglyphic”) and romantic. This is not the cemetery of horror films and hauntings. A cemetery, for Whitman, is not a sad or frightening place.

Whitman knows that a cemetery (or dead) is where we all end up; “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff”, all “the same”, all received the same. The grass grows around them, between them, and over them. The same grass grows “among black folks as among white”. Death can’t be cheated and death does not discriminate. Throughout his poem Whitman gathers groups of people together and he does it here in this cemetery. Whitman represents us all as one in the cities and in the end. I think it’s fascinating that he puts us together in death before he puts us together in life.

My three to five page essay for this assignment would focus on the topic in my last paragraph. I would like to take a closer look at the lists of people and occupations we find several times in Whitman’s poem.

Using New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery to Explore 1855 New York and Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

I’ll be the first to admit that working with these maps is a little challenging and nothing like a quick visit to Google Earth. To get a closer look at each map you will need to use the zoom option on the NYPLDG page; once you’ve done this you’ll find that you are able to move around the neighborhood and explore. The first image in this collection offers a reference guide to these maps. Using this as a guide, create a pictorial tour of the neighborhood on any one map in the collection. Find images of the types of businesses and buildings that occupied a city block. Given the types of buildings in the neighborhood, was it filled with workers or was it more residential? Who occupied these spaces? What did they look like, how did they live? Did one socio-economic group or several populate this neighborhood? Again, find images to support your answers to these questions.

Link your findings back to Whitman’s poem. Create a document that combines your findings with Whitman’s poem.

Working with Whitman's "Song of Myself"

What makes Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” an American poem?

Over the next several class meetings we will try to answer this question. As preparation, visit the Whitman archive and read the 1855 text of “Song of Myself”. The poem begins just above page 14 and ends with page 56. You are not required to print out all of the pages but we will be dividing the poem into sections that you will be required to bring to class. Below find which seven pages you need to bring to our next class meeting. Spend some time reading your assigned pages out loud; be prepared to read the entire poem with a small group of your classmates.

Students A, B, C, D print pages 14-20

Students E, F, G, H print pages 21-27

Students I, J, K, L print pages 28-34

Students M, N, O, P print pages 35-41

Students Q, R, S, T print pages 42-48

Students U, V, W, X print pages 49-56

If you’re nervous about reading aloud maybe John Doherty will inspire you.

Now that you’ve read to poem silently and out loud to yourself, it’s time you had a chance to hear it read to you. You’ll form into five groups to allow for a complete reading of “Song of Myself”. Take 45 minutes to read the poem and begin discussing your experiences reading the poem alone (silently or aloud) and reading it as a group. We’ll meet back here and discuss as a class. We’ll continue this discussion when we meet again.

In the meantime, take a look at 1855 street maps of New York, Paris, and London. Explore them and consider people living in those places at that time; how did they move about the city, interact with others, how likely were they to encounter someone outside of their class or community? Do these maps raise any other questions about life in the United States versus life in Europe in 1855? Be prepared to discuss these questions and how Whitman’s poem illustrates these differences.

Lastly, do a little exploring yourself. On pages 21 and 22 Whitman list several types of people and working he has seen in America, find an image of one them and their European counterpart. Write a short response (2-3 paragraphs) your 1855 American has to "Song of Myself" and questions his or her European counterpart has about the poem. The questions can be in the form of a lengthy conversation between these two people or they can simply be a list of questions. If you present this as a conversation you do not have to write the response of the 1855 American.

What Makes "Song of Myself" an American Poem?

Could it be that Whitman was writing about New York in 1855? How different was New York from Paris or London at the same time? One way to study this question is to look at the city street maps of these places.

New York of 1855 has the look of a well planned and new city; its streets and blocks are orderly and linear. The streets of New York stand in stark contrast to the meandering, unfolding, and twisting streets of Paris and London. The people of New York are forced to move through time and space differently than their counterparts in London and Paris. It is not hard to imagine that Americans face more than their physical space differently than the English and the French. These maps alone don't state this explicitly but give us a visual image we can start from as we try to understand the differences between these people and their environments.

Help! I need an IT person at my side.

I'm reminded of the way I used to feel the night before our family vacations ... something's going to happen and it's going to be big and I'm going to be part of it. My stomach would be full of butterflies. That's how I'm feeling right now.

What I'd like to do with the archive is link words in the poem to the critics’ response to the word and the phrase. I'm sure there's a way that's less clunky than what I've come up with. Here's an example of what I've been playing with:

Leaves of Grass.

I CELEBRATE myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

“From the unique effigies of the anonymous author of this volume which graces the frontispiece, we may infer that he belongs to the exemplary class of society sometimes irreverently styled "loafers." He is therein represented in a garb, half sailor's, half workman's, with no superfluous appendage of coat or waistcoat, a "wide-awake" perched jauntily on his head, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip, with a certain air of mild defiance, and an expression of pensive insolence in his face which seems to betoken a consciousness of his mission as the "coming man." This view of the author is confirmed in the preface. He vouchsafes, before introducing us to his poetry, to enlighten our benighted minds as to the true function of the American poet.” [Dana, Charles A.]. "[Review of Leaves of Grass (1855)]." New York Daily Tribune 23 July 1855: 3.

I think the reviewer’s thoughts on the poem and loafers is interesting and gives the reader insight to how the word loafe may have been interrupted by some to the readers in 1855. I’d like to be able to link the word to this particular quote but with my novice understanding of the tools I find that I am only able to link to the entire article. Maybe I need to explore Delicious; this may be the way to go. If Diigo was more reliable I think it would be perfect for this.

I want to spend more time with the blog entries of my classmates; they seem to understand the technology much better than I do.

Whitman Archive and Wonderland

Like Alice I seemed to have fallen into a rabbit hole. Falling, falling, falling with images and sounds floating past me as I try to make sense out of all it. At one point I had a tab for each of the six versions of “Leaves of Grass” in the Whitman Archive and moved awkwardly from one to the other, trying to match them up to find changes the poet made as he moved toward the death bed version of his poem. Then, I couldn’t help myself; I had to see the man. What did he look like when he wrote the 1855 version? How did age along the way and what’s the last image of him we have? I was disappointed to discover that archive doesn’t have a photograph of Whitman after 1866. But later images of poet are easy to find.

The correspondence in the archive is currently limited to letters from Walt Whitman’s brothers Thomas Jefferson Whitman and George Washington Whitman. I enjoyed reading a few of them but realized they weren’t helping me to understand the poem … another rabbit hole.

But then I tumbled into another branch of the rabbit hole that informed and enhanced my reading of the poem. The archive has a large collection of contemporary reviews of Whitman's work and they are organized by edition of the poem. For me, part of understanding this work comes from learning how it was received at time it was written. The New York Daily Times finds the poem “too frequently reckless and indecent though this appears to arise from a naive unconsciousness rather than from an impure mind.” The critic quotes extensively from Whitman’s frontpiece and several of the poems are reprinted in this review. The reviewer is clearly not comfortable with much of Whitman’s language but closes by saying that an open minded reader “will discern much of the essential spirit of poetry” in Whitman’s work. I have always been told that Whitman’s work represented a huge change for poetry, that his work was a departure from the poetry of the day. I read several of the reviews and enjoyed exploring the critical response of his contemporaries.

Next, I will climb out of the rabbit hole and work exclusively with the 1855 digital copy of “Leaves of Grass”.

RSS in the classroom

Students need to proof, edit and critique each other’s papers in composition classes; I think this could be managed through blogs and a class specific RSS. Assignments would be posted on individual blogs and the comment section would be used for, well, comments. Additionally, students could print out the essays and edit on them directly and bring them to class to exchange and discuss. This will require a different kind of management on the teacher’s part but it would not be difficult.

Thoughts after Thursday's readings and discussion

Today’s technology has reinvigorated the art of correspondence. E-mail, texting and Facebook have people using a QWERTY keyboard and the twelve keys or pads of their cells phone to communicate. My son and his peers write to each other much more than my friends and I ever did but at what price? I’ll admit I’m writing to friends and family too on all of the devices. For the most part, I use the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation I learned in elementary school but I must confess they are slipping away. My son told me I didn’t need to sign my text messages because he knew who was writing. He also could not understand why I bother with question marks, commas, and apostrophes. I realize texting and writing in Blogs and other on-line settings are not the same but I’m not sure everyone sees it that way. Bass and Rosenzweig note that “writing through on-line interaction,” allows for “joining literacy with disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry” (6) which is very exciting but I worry that in a student’s haste to participate they may not write carefully and thoughtfully. This is something that needs to be considered as we use technology in the classroom. At this point, I’m not sure how this will work. It’s something I hope to understand by the end of this course.

Bass and Rosenzweig discuss the importance of teaching “the critical evaluation of sources” (8) and “introducing students to the inquiry process” (10) before diving into use of web for accessing information. Is it safe to assume students will arrive at with this understanding or is this something we should be prepared to address in our classrooms?