ModPo 2013 #67 Seeing Through Poetic Eyes: On Baum's "Card Catalogues" and "Dog Ears"

A screen shot of "Apparitions" from Erica Baum's Card Catalogues

This reminded me of Pound's "In A Station of The Metro." Reading through "Card Catalogues" was such a pleasure for me. I still remember going to the library and looking through card catalogues. I still remember classes where we were taught how to navigate these boxes of subjects and topics. It's a disappearing world...if not already disappeared. That's why "Apparitions" has such a haunting effect. It appears, briefly, like a ghost, in a world that has moved on to Google searches. My children won't experience anymore encountering words the way Erica Baum documents them. 

The process is simple: document the words as seen in card catalogues. But these strange (and uncanny) juxtapositions are created by such arbitrary things as: librarian's choices and the popularity (and therefore the thickness of the stack) between topics and the order in which the words were alphabetized. It takes a poet to recognize these found words floating about in a fading world.  

Screen shot from Erica Baum's "Dog Ears"

I like the metaphor of dog ears as reader engagement (taken from the video discussion), creating physical turns for the "found poem" lines. Once again, Baum documents the analog. I wonder if in the the future, this physical turning of pages will disappear in favor of digital reading? 

Baum's project reminds me that I am surrounded by poetry. I am surrounded by a living language that constantly appears, disappears and reappears. 

Anyway, I could not do this essay without creating my own "found poetry"out of images the way that Erica Baum does. It's too tempting! So, here's my offering. I made a Google search on images for the words "Poetry" and chose the seventh and eighth row from the top and took a screen shot. Here is the result. 

Google search (Images) 2013-11-17 Sunday 10:11 a.m.

I realize that this is a unique result...produced only today (because the algorithm will shift in a matter of hours if not days) and in my geography (different IP addresses might produce different results). The world has offered up this answer to the query "poetry." It is a multimedia "piece" using not only words in comprehensible form but also word clouds and images. My favorite is the last picture at the bottom right: a tree seen through a pane of glass spattered with rain drops seen through a black and white lens. It's evocative and is literally an image (versus an imagistic poem). It is an image in itself but it requires me, the viewer, to make something out of it and connect it to the search query. Centuries of definitions seen side by side on a screen. 

That's how powerful language is. It encompasses all.

ModPo 2013 #17 A Scene From The Far West: On Pound's "The Encounter"

Japanese paper fan image from memory.loc.gov.

Ezra Pound, "The Encounter"

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

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What struck me most about the video discussion, more than the dislike of most of the participants of speaker's objectification of the woman in the poem, was the term "the far east." The far east is in the imagination of those in the far west. It is a matter of perspective. 

This made me reflect further on the imagist manifesto. There are never any "hard and clear" words or poetry, not when there is a perspective to be considered. All words are subject to the blurred and the indefinite due to history, due to perspective. Language is always in flux. 

I also look at this from my 2013, Philippine eyes. What new morality? Over here we are still stuck in the morality of the Catholic church, well the ninety percent anyway who are Catholic. So it makes me laugh to see new morality. The times are also a-changing in the Philippines with the introduction of the reproductive health bill, finally approved by the upper and lower houses only in 2013. And even then, the powerful Catholic bloc has managed to get it stuck in the department of justice. 

I also look at this from how a Japanese paper napkin might feel like. It is brittle, dry. Could the woman in the poem be an old woman...perhaps too old to be putting "the new morality" in practice? I can understand how the imagist form of the poem indeed objectifies the woman in the poem. 

Overall, I keep in mind that any work of art is coming from a perspective. Just like journalism, there is no real objectivity despite the attempt to ensure that all sides are represented. The artist leaves his hand in the work of art whether he wants to or not. It is up to the reader, later on, to engage. The result will always be from a certain perspective. 

Thank You, #EDCMOOC & Making My Digital Artifact, Learning Is An Adventure

Thank You, #EDCMOOC & Making My Digital Artifact, Learning Is An Adventure

by Justine C. Tajonera

My #EDCMOOC (eLearning and Digital Cultures Massive Open Online Course) posts spring from my participation in the course offered for free by the University of Edinburgh via Coursera.org.

I had a lot of fun making my final assignment for my EDCMOOC (eLearning and Digital Cultures Massive Open Online Course) class. I combined other attempts at making a digital artefact into this final digital artefact and I was struck by my husband's reaction to it. I asked him if it was good, "Hon, do you think this will pass?" And he answered me with what I think this whole class was about: "Did you do it for the grade? Or did you do it to learn?"

Learning = Hard-earned Joy

What an amazing question! It captured the heart of learning. Many times in traditional school I did things for the grade. But there were other moments in school where I truly enjoyed, where I truly learned. And I would do those courses or classes again just for the sheer joy. In fact, I remember summers where I would glory in all the free time I had to read, just read. I would look up new words in the dictionary and I would just keep going. Those were magical days. I realize that real learning is like that. You keep going, you keep pushing at the edges because you just want to: curiosity, passion, enjoyment. I surely don't want to rob my kids of the pure enjoyment of learning. Of course, it's not all enjoyment. There was a degree of difficulty I had to overcome. And "getting it" is also a kind of hard-earned bliss that can't be matched by treats or novelties.

And that was what I got at the end of the course: a hard-earned joy. I remember those frustrating nights when one video just took forever to load and I was getting bleary-eyed with sleep deprivation. I remember trekking to a nearby coffee shop just to get at least three hours of concentration to write my blogs about the course. I remember being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers in the class and the list of tools for creating the digital artifact. I remember moments of insight that I couldn't help but turn to my husband and share what I just learned from a video or from an online essay. It was all worth it.

Going Digital With Our Homeschool Curriculum

Just yesterday, we attended a family convention conducted by the provider of our homeschool curriculum, The Master's Academy, and they introduced a new pilot project called Genyo.com.ph, an online supplemental course that includes five core subjects including our mother language, Filipino (this is something that's really hard to find online). But by then...I had already discovered IXL.com and Salman Khan's absolutely wonderful Khan Academy. My son is already enrolled in IXL and he just loves earning his medals and achieving mastery with each subject. He has a love for Math that I never had.

I think Genyo.com.ph was introduced to us just in time, especially after having attended this EDCMOOC. I could look at it all within the context of what we had just digested. We signed up right away and I'm excited to try it out with my son.

Not For The Grade But For The Learning

Taking this course has really challenged my idea of how to check for learning. Assessment and test scores have their place but they are not the be-all and end-all of learning. Far from it. Now I see that there are other innovative ways of engaging kids and really helping them learn. Now I see the importance of creating portfolios (the term that our homeschool provider uses....which is a different term for artifacts). These are project opportunities that can combine several subjects so that the student can really see how all of them can be combined for something that is important to him or to the community. Projects put things in perspective and holistically integrates different subjects into a common theme. I think this is more important and a better gauge of analysis and creation than just pure grades.

Purposeful, imaginative learning

I thought that the exploration of posthumanism and transhumanism was really important in coming back to a key concept: challenging humanity's purpose. It's not an easy question to answer. It takes whole lifetimes. It is an ongoing project and it is far from over. It is something that gives context as well to the way I am teaching my kids. It's good to always put the background of purpose in everything we do. What's the point? That's something that I want my kids to learn to ask as well.

What will get us through this shared project is imagination. That's why I really value stories. I especially loved the stories that came out in the films and Sci Fi books (I downloaded some as additional reading after the class). The best of stories are never didactic and never have a hard edged "lesson" to learn. The best of stories help us ask questions and imagine scenarios. The best of stories help us make sense of who we are...and points us to our own stories and perspectives, fortifying them or challenging them. This is what I can give to my kids: the love of searching for more stories, reading them and making their own.

I really loved this class and I will miss it.

But wait. There are still a lot of MOOCs waiting. Onwards then!

Update as of March 5, 2013: I am signed up with the CS50 Introduction to Computer Science of Harvard (EDX). I have also signed up to two more classes on Coursera: 1) Design, Creation of Artifacts in Society (University of Pennsylvania) and 2) Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally (UC Santa Cruz).  Looking forward to blogging my updates on this journey.