“If you’re going to count on the competition to bring out your best work, you’ve surrendered control over your most important asset. Real achievement comes from racing ahead when no one else sees a path—and holding back when the rush isn’t going where you want to go.”
—Seth’s Blog: Run your own race
September 2011
10 posts
Play
“Every time I write, I try to hold
the world still by noticing how the world moves. Butterflies
fear the pins of this method, I fear what happens
after the pinhole at the end of this sentence.” —Bob Hicok, ‘Waiting For My Foot To Ring’.
the world still by noticing how the world moves. Butterflies
fear the pins of this method, I fear what happens
after the pinhole at the end of this sentence.” —Bob Hicok, ‘Waiting For My Foot To Ring’.
“It was particularly disconcerting for me to realize that when the priorities of adults and kids diverge, we simply assume that ours ought to displace theirs. Stop wasting your time learning song lyrics when you could be doing important stuff — namely, whatever’s in our lesson plans: solving for x or using apostrophes correctly or reading about the Crimean War. We tell more than we ask; we direct more than we listen; we use our power to pressure or even punish students whose interests don’t align with ours. This has any number of unfortunate results, including loss of both self-confidence and interest in learning. But let’s not forget to number among the sad consequences the fact that many students quite understandably choose to keep the important parts of themselves hidden from us. That’s a shame in its own right, and it also prevents us from being the best teachers we can be.”
—
There are three sets of goals to consider in any workshop: your own, as the facilitator; the teacher or institution who/which has booked you; and the students/participants you’re working with. Your challenge: to balance those (sometimes conflicting) considerations and create (curate?) a valuable, meaningful experience.
Not to forget, the workshops we run as poets can allow our students to open up and explore parts of themselves that they don’t reveal to the teachers (and even other students) they see every day. If there’s no value placed on the act of listening, those revelations go unheard, if they even happen at all.
Alfie Kohn: What We Don’t Know About Our Students — And Why We Don’t Know It
I’m on the road, running masterclasses for poets who want to develop their teaching practise and work in education up and down the country. Southampton at the beginning of the week, Norwich yesterday, Birmingham today and six more to go. Six hours of tools, techniques, challenges and practical issues, and there’s so much to cover.
One of the things I’ve underlined in every session is the need within a workshop to establish an awareness of goals. I always try to create some space for the people I’m working with to let me know what it is that they want to get out of our time. Or at least to ensure that the people I’m working with feel they’re being listened to. One of my goals is to encourage my students/participants to claim ownership of their experience. The reality is that many of the students I meet in my school visits didn’t come to class for a poetry workshop. They’re sitting in front of me because someone else has decided that they have to be there, that they have to learn something about poetry, or that poetry might be an interesting way to explore some other subject. But I don’t want to try to push ideas into anyone’s head by brute force— ideally, I want minds open and ready to receive. So I listen. I create a space where listening is a valuable act.There are three sets of goals to consider in any workshop: your own, as the facilitator; the teacher or institution who/which has booked you; and the students/participants you’re working with. Your challenge: to balance those (sometimes conflicting) considerations and create (curate?) a valuable, meaningful experience.
Not to forget, the workshops we run as poets can allow our students to open up and explore parts of themselves that they don’t reveal to the teachers (and even other students) they see every day. If there’s no value placed on the act of listening, those revelations go unheard, if they even happen at all.
(via Robert Greco)
“
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
” —Mary Oliver, from “When Death Comes” (via Rachel Mennies)
Play
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”
—Aristotle.
“Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It’s chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.”
—
—China Miéville
I’m heading to Latvia today to run poetry/performance workshops, feature at a local poetry festival, survey the local slam scene and deliver a lecture on the relationship between my city and my poetry. I get to spend the time with poet, performer and novelist Aoife Mannix, and I’ll be travelling with my brand new second-hand Bronica ETRSI. Looking forward to a few days out of the country…
“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say “I read, therefore it writes.”
—from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. (via viafrank)
