Everything Is Subject To Change

We count on the constancy of story. Freddy Malins arrives drunk to the party, Desdemona drops the handkerchief, Nell flees home with her primer and then leads a tribe, Rumplestiltskin tears himself in two. When we close a book and shelve it, we are assured of its beginnings and endings remaining the same, and that the story will unfold as it always has for us, as consistent as taxation.

Oral stories, however, migrate and are ever-changing. They are shapeshifters in a world that has no particular cover, back matter, or organized chapters. Morphing across cultures, through time, they live in the breath and memory of the person sharing the story. The listener may attach her own meaning to a detail, and in the retelling, alter the plot or the ending. Oral stories escape boundaries. They are clouds.

When we tell personal stories we are almost always the hero. Hyperbole starts to expand our stories as we age. The plots get twistier, the details juicier. The arc takes longer to travel because we love the audience, the attention, and that someone cares to listen. Our stories tell us who we are and how we’ve changed. They connect us to others. Without them, what happens? Who are we?

My mother has a gold locket that has been in her possession for almost sixty years. When she wasn’t wearing it one day during the 1970s, I discovered it was empty, and was bothered that it had no contents, so I sneaked a large green sequin inside. Lockets were supposed to contain stories. I had no photograph that fit or seemed fair enough, but I had the sequin, a little glint of cheer.

I don’t know anymore which family stories are true. I doubt my own memory of them. Photographs have allowed me to remember or fill in the blanks easily. My sister’s account of a shared story is often a completely different perspective from mine.

There are days now when my mother starts to tell a familiar family tale, then turns to me with a performer’s panicked look to her partner of “take it!” The plot, lost in the details, has shifted course and is flying to another island.

My memory of the gold locket story of my mother’s earlier telling is that it was a nursing school graduation gift from her parents. Yesterday she told me and my sister that she and two other classmates bought them for themselves, and she was the only one out of the group who kept hers for all these years. Is the truth in this story that her parents gifted her money to buy the locket, and she and her friends all got matching ones? Does it matter?

My mother has faced a lot of loss this year. Among the losses, her once reliable memory. She’s becoming the abstract expressionist narrator of her life story. The shifting narratives sometimes bother me, because we once shared the “truth.” What I’m learning from all of this is that maybe there is no truth.

We fear losing ourselves, losing our minds and memories. Genetics play a part, so this could be my fate too, the sureness of erasure.  We talk about dementia with verbs of thievery, and rarely with verbs of generosity. It is difficult to write with the additive when there are so many subtractions. There are moments of grace in dementia, like an openness to shifting narratives, the abstract, a letting go of time, allowing the self to be the self as she is now. To just be.

I put a large green sequin into a locket once to stave off what I perceived as emptiness. The story, when I opened the covers of that little gold book, seemed to be missing, but maybe it was just being written in invisible ink. A mystery-romance-thriller-fairytale-fantasy of a life being lived.

Wednesday Pickup of My Truth

My truth is that I know nothing.

One day I will return to chlorophyll
and it’s easy for me to face this
while I still remember my own name,
can write these words with my hand
on this piece of paper that was once a tree.

The body of the Marquis de Sade
became a tree after he died.
His request was to be buried
with acorns, and their little
green horns nosed
into his flesh,
nourished.

To be greening!
Or green!
A fresh lawn!
An oak!

To dream of joining the chorus
of twig, bark and root,
the mysticism of up, up, up.

Maybe you know everything then,
have all the answers but can’t speak,
how poetic, forced to watch others
make mistake after lonely mistake
in their crosswords and delegations,
negotiations lost.

You unfurl your tiny green flags
and they wave. You change
them all to red, a warning,
and finally just give up, your truth
on the ground for others
to rake up into piles, thrust
into paper bags and park
at the curb for Wednesday pickup.

Your heart is a nest of squirrels.
Birds mate in your brain
and then there are more birds,
and don’t cardinals carry the souls
of the dead?

I know nothing,
but can speak,
today.
It feels dangerous,
reckless,
to be alive.

No-Brainer

A hand other than your own
covers your mouth.

You think about the haphazard way
that prayer works, miracles,
wishes.

The obvious choice
is to stay put. Don’t move.

There is no form for this —
you ought to know it by now,
instinct, the body’s language,
a total no-brainer. Not some
second grade teacher’s 5-7-5
relief during the poetry unit,
an easy formulaic response
to growls of cherry blossoms.

Oh no. This is full-on, redoubled,
wheeling epic free verse —fever dream,
old-bones- rocked-to-sleep-on-a-razor’s-edge-can-of-soup-
there-is-not-enough-Vicodin-for-this-armada.

A ship is pulled underwater in your chest.
Cows graze in your head.
Your feet have no imagination.

You should know this one.
Don’t speak. Leave it blank.
There’s your control.

You stand up. You raise your hand,
fail the test over and over again.

The obvious choice
is to stay put. Don’t move.

A hand other than your own
covers your mouth.

You host the barbarian,
you are incendiary,
you are the reason
we have no way
to grade this.

For My Dead Classmates

You miss so much
by being dead.

The stirred up embers
of a recalcitrant argument,
Virtue and crime
in the same narrow bed.

You miss so much —
a space to find yourself
breathing in again,
a heart full of beehives
and inquisitions,
the sometimes friendly sky,
and a glance in the mirror
on a good hair day.

Nostalgia. Who owns that,
the dead or the living?

Perhaps you miss that
or maybe there’s no memory,
all of it just a juked up Polaroid.

Hey, there’s no history then,
or race, or belief, and lucky you,
no war! There is no truth
other than that of being dead.

A sureity.

You miss teacups, or beer,
tindered fires,
eccentricity,
the 2 a.m. dust-up
with your landlord
for having a man
in your apartment.
Are we living in the 1950s?!
you shouted, wielding
a Rubik’s Cube.
It’s all you had.
The first thing you picked up.

The first thing you remember
having. You miss that? Possessions.
Gone now. Some relegated
to antiquedom, others nothing more
than apple core and lint. As if your love
for a particular ballpoint pen
kept it alive, would make someone
else desire it.

Music and desire.
Throng and thrum in your ears
and chest, a throne of rhythms.
The Clash,
Bronski Beat,
Van Halen,
Hüsker Dü.
Some of us will hear
tinkly versions of our favorites
in the dining rooms of the retirement homes
where we find ourselves living. We
will look for your aged faces at our table,
expect you to flop down with your
lunch bag full of potato chips
and Farmer’s iced tea.

You miss so much.
Assertive heels.
Peach juice.
Long insomnia.
Garlic, onions,
an open stage
or a quiet corner.

Your own name spoken
by someone you loved.

Who loved you.

Trapeze

Lostness bursts into the day

like a bright trapeze

and you grasp it on the upswing,

howl through the air.

Fine. You’re more acute alone

anyway, striking a match,

stalking a cloud, trying to align

your functional body

with all the stories it still

wants to tell.

Expectations trill and purl,

sweet beasts that belong

in cages. Let them pace.

How violent and heartless

you are up here, how led

by your own blindness.

It is impossibly gorgeous

to slice the sky, to let go

with potential and swing

to stillness and fictitious force.

Your body now an exclamation mark,

full stopped in a shout:

I am not here!

No, I am here,

I am here,

see me.

Time and the Shape of a Life

"How many sessions do we have left?" a woman asks. She's a participant in the life writing workshop I'm teaching. I've asked the group to choose a partner to go through the process of interviewing each other on a topic. A bonding experience as much as the chance to be a storyteller and an active listener. When offered a few choices, they opted to tell stories of travel.

"Nine," says the senior center director. "There are nine sessions left."

The same woman with the question about sessions pulled me aside our first meeting to correct something she said when we wrote a group poem. "I meant lithography when I said etching. You can change it if you want." The detail mattered to her and it had to be right for the record. After the interviewing she told a long story of all her travels that circled around into telling about her children. She felt squeezed for time.

There is never enough time to tell your story. And how can you even see the shape of your story when you are in the middle of it, living?

On my computer is a file I ran across while I was preparing for this residency at the senior center. It's titled "95 Year Plan." I don't remember making it. It's a grid with the left hand vertical column showing my age in five year increments.  I went up to 95, a hopeful thinker, or maybe it was part of the instructions to do so. This must have been a writing exercise from a book I was reading or a workshop I took.

There are three other columns to the right of the age column which read: "Major Event," "What I Learned" and "The Most Amazing Thing I Saw."  I never finished it. I filled out the "Major Event" column up to age 55 and I gave up. I stopped recording "What I Learned" at age 20 when the "Major Event" was "got first real job as a typesetter" and the "What I Learned" was that "most real jobs suck." When I was 15 I learned that I was able to succeed at something I didn't necessarily want to do for the rest of my life.

I can see why I never finished this project. Filling the entire grid out is tempting fate, and reminds me of keeping a ten year plan for my life with clear, achievable goals. I've never operated that way. I like leaving places blank to allow for  the "Not Quite What I Was Planning" column and the "Spontaneous Magic" column and the "Mentor From an Unexpected Place Arrives and Kicks Your Ass" column. Actually, I can't even conceive of my life in a grid or with columns. It isn't a line. It's not a circle, because it will end someday, and I will feel like it's unfinished. I am unsure as to what shape it is at all, or even if it has a shape.

The attempt to record the details of one day, which I do each morning when I journal, can feel like riding the edge of some protoplasmic creature. I catch only moments as the rest of the day slips into another current and I am forced to let go. I always close the journal with a little sense of loss. I'm adding, but I'm losing too. Writing a life can feel deleterious.

How many sessions do we have left? Who knows. You won't catch it all. Create anyway.

Muse

My window is a broken mind, all
scattershot with spaces that
time screaks through, dates and numbers I
leave in shards at your feet. I trust
the wing-clamor of branches, but not this
toothbrush. The slow alphabet of my heart
in this small room of body has
built and wrecked me, lagged and led
my life. See how all women fall? Not me.
I float on wordlessness, naked. Almost content to.
--
Another one for my mother. This has an echo. Read down the right side of the poem for a phrase.

Bullet Journal: February

If you add order to your days,
graph paper, gel pens, post-it notes —
and record it all, a crochet
of charts, progress, your mind devoted
to that forward arrow — if your throat
chokes on time’s constancy, just play
with colored pencils, add a favorite quote.
Craft the human ordeal.

Essential accessories: stencils
for thought bubbles, the personal
accusations, dark snark, the chill
winds of what you didn’t do. Decals
add emphasis to weekly logs, all
actionable to-dos that you will,
you swear, get to. Washi tape goals.
Craft the human ordeal.

Rapid logging is the solution
to sustained contemplation. Mark
events with an O, notes with a dash —
Simplify, compartmentalize the shark’s
jaw of surgery, muzzy bazaar
of painkillers, snow blowgunned
against a window full of paper hearts.
Craft the human ordeal.

Download a matching shade of nail polish
for your Instagram of today’s page,
Inspire everyone with your mantra:
Craft the human ordeal.

What We See and Don't See

 

My father once saw a soap bubble float across the road as he drove home from work. He described it as perfect and alone in its incongruous drift through traffic. He didn't want to hit it. "I'm sure it was a fairy," he said.

My father believed in magic. He read everything there was to read about the Arthurian legend. He was logical and orderly, and his handwriting was that of a draftsman -- squared off capital letters that let the reader know exactly what his message was. He was gifted in spatial thinking. He could build a bathroom where there wasn't one and make it look like it was part of the original structure of the house.

I never considered my father very emotional. The story we tell ourselves about fathers is that they are strong, the roots of the tree untouched the wind. I saw him cry a few times. Laugh many. He held his hand over his heart when he laughed hard. He was intelligent, so it was my secret mission always to make him laugh. If I could make someone as smart as he was laugh it was a true accomplishment. To bring him to the laughcry was a rich reward. I love to make my mother laugh too, for the same reasons.

I was, and still am, horrible at building birdhouses. I did, and still do things in a strange and illogical order. I once, just for fun, tried to glue ice together. Being able to make my father laugh connected us when I felt we weren't connected at all.

I have his eyes. I always say I don't think he knew how he ended up with a poet for a daughter, but I think he knew exactly how he ended up with a poet as a daughter. He was one himself, but he was a poet with light instead of words.

As I was writing this, my daughter brought up a piece of his stained glass that was hanging in the window downstairs.

It blew off in that big gust of wind.

Really? Wow. I'm writing about grandfather right now.

Ah, he's here.

So I hung up the piece in my studio window, where it catches light in the leaves and curlicues he painted by hand. There are twenty golden circles at the center, like bubbles, to remind me that where I come from, where we all come from, is magical. That anything is possible.


* Artwork created by a high school student at Canterbury High School in Canada, where Dan and I spent time as resident artists a few years ago. And by a few, I mean something like five.

Cognitive Assessment

Remember these words in this order:
red velvet daisy church face. Got it?

Here, let’s say them first together.
Remember these words in this order.
A color? Good. A fabric? Great! Flower?
You can do it, take your time. Commit.
Remember these words in this order:
red velvet daisy church face. Got it?


Now tell me how to draw a clock —
After the circle, what shows the time?

The curtains pulled at noon, it’s dark —
Now tell me how to draw a clock.
After the hands, what are the marks?
Verbal, you don’t need a pen, you’re fine.
Now tell me how to draw a clock —
After the circle, what shows the time?

--

A triolet, doubled. I think each stanza can work on its own with the same title, but I had more to write than one octave.

Solitaire

My father has work to do,
needs to play his cards face up, not
block in case there’s a king to move
into this or that open space. The cards

of his last days, in descending order. Unless
God pops up from the foundation pile, you
can expect only the continuous snap, see
him shuffle from recliner to the immediate

safety of bathroom. There is no gain
in his decision to let go of his heart. It’s a shitty deal.
We may never know what is hidden in one
tableau or another, a gem or a regret. At

best we learn to expose the cards we cannot see, a
joker of preparation, the illusion of a suit that tricks time.

--
A Bref Double a la Echo (sans rhyme) this morning. The end words of each line read: Do not move cards unless you see immediate gain. Deal one at a time.

Seeing

I'm off Facebook indefinitely, which has over the course of a couple of days given me more time to think for myself. This morning I woke up and wondered what day it was and my answer was "seven." Then I realized it was Thursday, but that Thursday is seven. And Saturday is ten. And Friday has always been eight, but I'm not sure what Monday or Tuesday or Sunday are. Wednesday is five. I'm not sure if this is clarity or some other vision, but I'll take it over what is shared on social media.

In dance, I don't think. I move. When given the time to reflect on it the other night, I recognized that in all angular movements (robot, signal), my eyes know exactly where to go. Exclusive. It is a singularity of vision. When my body is in fluid movement (bubble, ooze, clouds), my gaze is everywhere, a plurality of vision. Inclusive. There's no judgement in these observations. They are just observations, and subject to change as I explore more the spaces between movement and language.

My handwriting over the past few mornings has produced a couple of visual poems. Today I took some time to re-create them. I'm not sure if they are improvements over the original "mistakes" or just new ideas entirely.

 

Why I Collect Spent Matchsticks

Not ten of them
but hundreds.

Not for the firework
of their blockbuster blossoming.
Not the lick ticking clock
or the lipstick worn down
to a curve of lip.
Not for a curl of smoke
or wisp of hair.
Not for the closed eye
or ear.

Never in a stack, not glued.

Each phosphorus blast
is a brocade of sun at my fingers.
Not trees with their shade of clouds.

A series of ones, stuttering duds.
My drenched bonfire society!

Singular candles of complaint
I strike, hiss, hiss, miss.
Wooden snakes with dead heads.

No. Not death.

A fever of peonies,
my inferno of pinwheels.
Sparklers that saluted
one difficult and glorious day
after another.
--

An recording of me reading this poem is available here.

Departures and Arrivals

Gypsy moth caterpillars parade by our tentative feet
in the short term parking lot, a long walk
from your international flight. Oh how I love
and have loved the sky that was television blue
that day in September when you were in second grade
and unaware. Fear painted us all bright as a game.

Parts of fire ladders and stairwell remain. Today the game
is departure. Let’s go, let’s go, say your ticking feet,
steps ahead of mine, ready for a fresh grade
of landscape, centuries old and embryonic, a walk
through operatic pastures, a kiss under blue
club lights in Spain. I let you go to love

the world and all its stories of love —
slurred, deferred, the ones we made into a game
to conquer, look how old they are, how blue
the bruises are, still. I hope that your feet
only have to handle the glamour of dancing, a walk
through mountains with windy arms. I grade

what I haven’t seen by what I’ve read. You’ll grade
nothing, live in corners without banners, love
and remember streamers and lamplight, a walk
far from the sea, from me, your mother’s game,
a showcase full of worried birds. Their dusty feet
a bunch of pitiful rakes that gain no flight, no blue.

This is just how it is, it’s how far I can go with you, the blue
is yours. For now. Take it. The panoramic view is a grade
of empire without a ruler, no one ever owns it. Clamorous feet
have tried. Our country always marches in the name of love
while chanting inside a courtyard of dead bodies. The game
is not to look too American. To understand our walk

has the look of daggers and nostalgia. I’ll wait to recognize your walk
at the arrival gate, your stride thistled by growth. So much blue,
red and white in this open space, round crimson seats like game
pieces, drops of blood. Come home! Stay there! Grade
the fancy aching pain of experience against the love
of your unequal family, exchange your money, wash your feet

in the happiness of those walks that blotted all grade,
laundered everything to blue. Here you are, yes, the love
I made, game spirit, who won’t even crush a caterpillar under her feet.

Body of Memory

Every day your body of memory,
string art of neurons, the center pulled taut.
Here you are again, a chain reaction

of catastrophic perfectionism,
trying, trying, trying as you drive the car home.
Every day your body of memory

dances the stories you thought you forgot --
the time a wren thwacked against the windshield.
Here you are again, a chain reaction,

nerve bundles at the side of the road,
feathers and wires of feet in your hands.
Every day your body of memory.

The car is a symbol for the body
in dreams, but this death is yours for real,
here you are! Again, a chain reaction,

your hands pulled the strings, stopped flight,
wrung out song. Your own fire of fingers,
every day. Your body of memory --
here you are again. A chain reaction.

--
A somewhat villanelle, written after taking a dance class.

How Many Poems Have You Sold, If Any At All?

Well, don’t be shy. Let me check the tally here,
under this stack of poems that I spilled tea on the other night.
The stain spread across lines about a bird that notices
the loose string of a clip-on tie. It’s not even my poem. A girl
about your age wrote it. She said, “I am not the whole.”

I am not the whole either. I am parts, many parts, a cobweb
that someone tried to relocate from an oak to a porch.

The girl leapt metaphorically from herself
to a bird in a class I taught. There’s that triumph.
Pay for that work covered the water, sewer,
and trash bills this month.

But you asked how many poems I’ve sold.
A specific question.

A boy in the sixth grade classes I’m teaching now
scrunches up his forehead at me and asks,
“When you’re not here, what do you do?” I tell him
I wait outside all night until I hear the door unlock.
Not too much of a lie.

“No, what do you REALLY do?” Hungry for the precise
answer too, that kid.

Are you supposed to sell poems? After 30 or so years
of writing them, I’m pretty sure no one wants
to pay for my truths. They prefer the news,
or reality television, the steady  thrum and throng
of here’s-what-you-should-think,
and ads that promise there’s a medication
for the way you’ve been staring out the window all this time,
instead of making money.

My truth is free.
So here it is.
I’ve sold no poems.

At least I don’t think so. Books of them, in a way,
but people always want to barter, or I end up
paying to ship them overseas. My poems
are better traveled than I am.

I’ve written as many as there were moths
on my bedroom ceiling at night when I was your age
and I couldn’t get to sleep in the black hole
that was the end of every single day.

I’m not sure what they are for in our world today.
Moths, or poems. They disappear.
A moth’s body —
have you seen it?
It is feathered dust.

If at all. You’re ruthless enough
to be the next one
to wait outside until you hear
the door unlock,
reverse your fame,
become the richest poor
woman alive
in her own
private
empire.

Are You Sure You Want To Delete All Files?

Poems are spoken, heard, felt, perhaps forgotten. Or in some instances, the words find their way onto a page that yellows, becomes brittle, and decays. You may spend three sleepless nights stringing 800 carnations for a one night event. Plays take shape for a few nights on a stage, and then the set is torn down, the props and flats packed up to build some other reality later.  The dialogue and nature of the character lives on in the actor only as long as the next role they play.

Performance is constantly changing as it is being created, and even as it has its run. It is fleeting. Miss it, and well, you've missed it. Entirely. There's no file recovery for missing the opportunity to see your friend Nick perform with his band because you opted to sit on the sofa and eat Oreos instead.

Yesterday a student in one of our classes lost all of her work. We've written self-portrait poems, and for the past week or so have created animations of the lines using iStopMotion on iPads. She deleted, accidentally, or possibly on purpose, all of the animation she created. Tears welled up with the realization that all of her work was gone. She left the room, collected her courage somewhere in the hallway, and returned to redraw. She learned one of the hard lessons of creating. Hearing "It will all be alright," or "I appreciate that you've gotten back to work," doesn't really help when you're mourning a loss. You're alone with empty hands. We'll discuss what happens when you lose all your work in class on Tuesday when some time has passed.

We've experienced all sorts of "All of my files are gone!" in this residency as well. The iPads have a function engaged on them that allows the user to delete files by shaking the device as you might shake an Etch-a-Sketch. It first prompts the user with "Are you sure you want to delete all files?" but short attention spans, or a desire to have a virtual dog gobble it all up, often ends in a click of the "yes." Then regret. Or delight, depending. Some people like starting from scratch. Others think deleting it all will be an excuse to get out of rewriting. That's a whole other lesson.

When the cat pees on your painting (this happened to me once - a critic!), or you break a bit of pottery, or even burn up your origami, you have pieces and parts (or ash) to work from, but when you work digitally, what is left? File recovery, if you're lucky.

All creation is ephemeral. Whatever you make will be gone through decay, erosion, explosions, deletion, including you and your beloved patterns, someday. Hit save all you want, you're on your way out. For now, go out in the hallway to find your courage to come back. Do something, anything, to add rather than subtract before you go.

You Don’t Get To Know Us Here: an Abcedarius of Loneliness in America

Angles everywhere, our pictures
burst into smirking. You have to give
credit to the walls, so ivory, so
dull they bore the next door neighbor’s
even thatch of lawn, while yours yawns
fists of weeds. So much is disguised, a
guise of “fine” and “great” and “ok” in your
hello, and you know yours isn’t the only house
iced with doors that look like slammed exits.
Just have a look at all the fences, keen in their
keep aways, keep backs, keep outs, keeping
love at length, love that spills its foreign
mortar shells at low and consistent velocities.
Niceties make it hard to visit, we can’t be
open, look each other in the eyes. Are we
protecting the holes already blasted into our chests, their
quarries of guns and valentines? There is that poem by
Rukeyser that lives inside you, and anytime you
stand in a crowded superstore you want to
take a stranger’s hand in yours, link the
unforgiving seconds of your life to theirs, add
value among the shelves bricked against us all
with fat free crackers and ziplocks of terror,
x-treme white breads that make us dizzy and forgetful.
You don’t get to know us here, standing in our lines at the
zero hour, riddled by our unfilled and overflowing baskets.

Building Up and Celebrating the Self through Visual Poetry and Creative Movement

It can be difficult to be open, to let yourself be vulnerable and at risk. Ready to fail. Open to criticism. Especially when you're young, and learning who you are, but it's even difficult as we age and are subjected to the droning messages of perfection. But when you are vulnerable, you are also open to moments of beauty. Moments of connection.

I've had two day-long sessions recently with students where we had the time to explore creative movement, writing, and our unique selves, both fragile and strong.

The second group, toward the end of the week, was with non-public middle school students. I introduced myself and the session, and let them know that we'd be writing some individual self-portraits. We'd also write countless group portraits by creating a kinetic poetry sculpture.

First we created anagrams from the letters in our names. I asked everyone to choose their favorite word from their name and then invited them to join me in a large circle in the back of the room. Each student created a movement to go with their name and word. As each person said their name and word and made their accompanying movement, it was repeated by the group, and then the next student took their turn, until we made it all the way around the circle. This never fails to illicit laughter, and is a great way to recall names.

  

We answered a series of open-ended questions, each student working on his or her own, and then we grouped up to discuss and report out some of the ideas and thoughts that were shared.

We read a self-portrait poem written by an 8th grade student, titled "The Strange Kid with the Red Face," and discussed the mood and tone of the poem, as well as all the different points of view the author used. 

We looked at some examples from the "This I Be" project, by photographer Steve Rosenfield, which explores the ideas of insecurity, vulnerability, and confidence.

We discussed some of our own insecurities, and then I modeled the trust fall with a friend who was in to audit my session. A couple of volunteers came up to give it a try. 

Whew! It's a little scary, letting yourself fall into a new friend's arms. Makes you feel open. A little vulnerable.

We wrote some of  our own "I am" and "I am not" statements, then shared them. I asked students to write an insecurity and a confidence on each hand. My insecurity is that I am clumsy. My confidence is that I am an encourager. My eyeliner pencils got a lot of sharpening this day, as everyone wrote and re-wrote, and shared.

There was a brief break in here to learn a circus (and life) skill -- balance! In particular, the balancing of feathers. We circled up, and everyone got a peacock feather and some instruction on keeping it balanced on the palm of the hand, the back of the hand, the chin -- there were a few who got their feathers to balance on their foreheads, too.

Credos, statements of belief, and creating metaphors and similes were our next bit of writing. We kept adding to our freewriting so we'd have enough content to work with when the time came for crafting a poem.

After reading another example of a self-portrait poem, we got to work writing our own, choosing the point of view, and spreading out all of our writing from the day -- the anagrams from our names, answers to the questions, I am/I am not statements, credos, and comparisons.

When the first drafts were done, we broke for lunch. Afterwards, we edited a bit, chose a few lines we wanted to use for the text transfer, and then we read a few poems out loud.

I showed the text transfer technique, and a few options for adding color to the blocks. Everyone set to work doing the typesetting of their phrases, adding layers of color to the blocks, and transferring their phrases to the blocks.

We gathered at the end of our session to arrange our blocks into different structures, and read what text appeared each time we rearranged. I asked everyone what they noticed about it.  

"It's a poem no matter where you read."