Welcome to Learning Event #10 (#LE10) for #WalkMyWorld 2021. In this journey we’ll think about the story of you…told from past, present, and future.

As we wrap up this latest iteration of WalkMyWorld, we’ll look back at what you’ve shared over the previous weeks. We’ll identify your best work and polish it up a bit to make it final.

Keep in mind, nothing is ever really finished in the creative process. But, for now, we want to identify our best work that we can share and archive for future generations.

We follow in the steps of Big Daddy Kane as he suggests in “Ain’t No Half Steppin.” You have an opportunity to “address with best finesse and bless the paragraphs I manifest.”

Begin by first reviewing all of the submissions you’ve written during our time together. What piece or themes resonate the most with you? It may be one submission or an idea that runs across multiple pieces.

Consider the following criteria to identify your stronger work:

• You tackled a big idea. This is something challenging, intriguing, exciting, meaningful, disturbing, or compelling. You dig deep…even into the smallest topics.
• You’re making the most of your space and time. You choose to rhyme or not follow a rhythm. You play with tone, spacing, pacing, and form to best share your work.
• You’re making great word choices. There are millions of words that you could have used in your piece. A good poem requires precision, thought, and care in these selections.
• You’re using powerful images. As a poet, you do your best to make sense of the world. A good poem often uses clear, memorable, concrete images to make a point.
• You’ve cut out everything unessential. Keep it simple. Less is more. Make sure every single word, comma, punctuation mark, and space is absolutely necessary to your poem.
• You share just enough. You don’t need to give away too little nor too much. You may want to be elusive, obscure, and purposeful when it suits you.
• You elicit strong emotional reactions. As you make sense of the world, or at least your part of the world, you may get a strong emotional response from your audience. A genuine emotional response may mean that you are connecting with others.
• You elicit a strong intellectual response. Some poems will not make you immediately laugh, cry, or gasp. Instead, they cause a bit of cognitive dissonance as the audience is left to linger with your ideas for some time.

WRITE

As we identify our best piece, we want to consider how we know what we know.

We make sense of the world through ways of knowing. The concept of knowing is about perceiving and understanding ourselves within our environment. Knowledge is about being able to communicate what you know and making it public.

The Lady of Shalott from Tennyson’s poem was forbidden to look at the outside world because of a curse. She must continually weave images on her loom without ever looking directly out at the world. Instead, she looks into a mirror, which reflects the busy road and the people of Camelot who pass by her island.

In what ways are your ways of knowing impacting the threads you use to weave a web of reality?

Rewrite, revise, or reframe your prior works to present your best work of our time together.

CONNECT

After you finish your poem…share this out with others.

You should share this out on Twitter as Write.As using the hashtag #WalkMyWorld. You should also include the hashtag #LE10 to indicate your response to this learning event.

Present your piece in our semi-private group in Flipgrid.

Finally, record any or all of your pieces or commentary to our page on SpeakPipe, or using the button embedded below. You are limited to five minutes in length for SpeakPipe.

I will upload all of these submissions to the Internet Archive and make our work, thoughts, and ideas available for future generations to consider.

If SpeakPipe isn’t working for you, send me an email and we can identify a better way to share your recordings.

Enjoy and connect with each other online.

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Graffiti flickr photo by Bombendrohung shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license

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