We ave spent many weeks sharing, tweeting, writing and exploring. We now ask you to gather a collection of walks you have shared over the last eight learning events.

For your next task we ask you to curate your lifeworlds (New London Group, 1996). In order to do this we will be using Storify.

Storify is a tool that allows you to collect images and posts from across the social media landscape. It will be easy to use with #walkmyworld.

Below I have shared a link Story. I have not finished the last part of the assignment. I need to write a poem that captures my walks.ut that can wait. First lets learn about Storify. Check out mine:

To help you try it on your own I have included both video #walkthrough and a static walkthrough.

Video Walkthroughs

If you need additional help feel free to check out the tutorial videos:

Creating a Storify Story using the Archive

Publishing and Sharing Your Storify Story

Static WalkThrough

The first step is to go to storify.com and register an account. The easiest way to verify your account is to sign in with Twitter.

Then add a title to your new Story on Storify.

We will use the embed URL feature and the #walkmyworld archive to build our stories in Storify. You cannot search by Twitter because Twitter only allows Storify to look back seven days.

Go to tiny.cc/walkmyworldarchive. Then select column B.

Find the Triangle in the upper left hand corner by mousing over. Then sort the colun by A->Z. This will collect the Tweets by user. Find your name.

Look for the Tweet you want to share.

Scroll over to Column Q. Here you will find the URL to the specific Tweet.

Copy the URL to your clipboard.

Paste in the URL.

Once the Tweet appears drag it over.

The Tweet will now appear in your story timeline.

You can add text above or below any Tweet you embed in Storify.

After you finish selecting all of the walks you want to share in your #walkmyworld story write a final reflection.

This can, and hopefully is, a poem.

You could also just write a few paragraphs reflecting on the practice.

In your reflection, either in prose or poetry, we ask you to return to the original prompts we shared with #walkmyworld

In what ways are you establishing your own identity through your naming of things?

In your naming of things in the #WALKMYWORLD project, how are you sharing your own private history?

How does your naming and identification of your world separate you from the world?

Then click publish.

Here is a remixed tutorial I made in popcorn:

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Welcome to the next learning event in #walkmyworld.

We want to continue and explore the work of Hass. Specifically we want to consider Hass’s ability to explore rich meaning in everyday observation. Hass noted that he has become known as a California poet, but for Hass this has more to do with using place as canvas:

I liked writing about my place. It gave me a subject; also I have always been very interested in natural history, and I had the idea, in my early work, that the sheer variety of the gene pool needed to be invoked and celebrated, if it was going to be saved, etc. But I found that I wasn’t really interested in or good at advocacy types of writing. It just wasn’t where my subject matter was. So the thought I had went something like this: if I live in my place and live my life and write about my subjects, whatever they turned out to be–love, grief, the nature of things, the nature of our nature, the riddles of existence–and drew on the materials of my place as the idiom of that expression, then that would be the kind of environmental writing I’d do. And that’s roughly how the northern California landscape functions in my work, I think.

Take the poem Happiness for example

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain—
they looked up at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating—

and because this morning
when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad
to coax an inquisitive soul
from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,
I drove into town to drink tea in the cafe
and write notes in a journal—mist rose from the bay
like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,
and a small flock of tundra swans
for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass
in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,
they are also called whistling swans, are very white,
and their eyes are black—

and because the tea steamed in front of me,
and the notebook, turned to a new page,
was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,
I wrote: happiness! it is December, very cold,
we woke early this morning,
and lay in bed kissing,
our eyes squinched up like bats.

The poem describes everyday events and has so many layers of meaning. This is our goal for #walkmyworld. We want our community to consider how we perceive our world. We want to consider how others my perceive our place. So please keep capturing and sharing your walks. They will be central to the next three learning events.

Until then let’s focus on the type of environmental writing Hass does.

The Challenge

For this learning event we want you to try and consider the human conditions that Hass explores in his description of the places he lives.

What is the “subject” of Happiness and how is this expressed as an idiom of expression of place?

When Hass describes his life and places in Happiness what connotative and figurative meaning can you find?

Can you detail a deeper meaning about the human condition through a description of a walk (image) you shared through #walkmyworld?

Get Involved

As always with #walkmyworld your level of involvement and medium is up to you. We just ask you consider one of all of the prompts above. You could:

Get involved in annotating the poem on Poetry Genius. Consider the prompts above as you code the text with purpose.

Analyze the poem in a blog post.

Create a multimodal retelling of the poem. You can find audio here.

Write a poem. Select one of your walks. Try to capture some larger element of human existence through your description of the walk (Hint that I learned in my last poem: Adverbs are the enemy of imagery).

Develop your own idea to reflect on Hass’s poem Happiness. You control your learning as you #walkmyworld.

image credit: Walk on by Ciril https://www.deviantart.com/art/Walk-on-13800694

Writers take risks. We hide our dreams and amplify our misgivings in the open; in our words. As a teacher of those who teach writing I want to take the journey that I encourage others to endure. So I share my poetry from #walkmyworld. It is not to simply enough to model the writing process. We have to be the writing process.

We began #walkmyworld with a purpose in mind: to use poetry so people could see how we name our world. We wanted you to explore the layers of power and meaning in the act of naming.

After deliberation it was decided to clothe these goals in the rich fabric of Robert Hass. Hass’s work, especially how he used his world to illustrate that which is named and unnamed, captures idea that writing is a vessel for perspectives. Hass explained,

I live in my place and live my life and write about my subjects, whatever they turned out to be–love, grief, the nature of things, the nature of our nature, the riddles of existence–and drew on the materials of my place as the idiom of that expression, then that would be the kind of environmental writing I’d doI wanted to collect the poems.

I am new to Hass, but have quickly fallen for the complexity of his simple observations. When Hass describes the natural world I find myself being taken to the limits of language while finding unchartered depths in the most literal of meanings.

So I have tried to experiment with his form, or at least try explore my identities, “in the place I live my life.”

The first poem was based off of Letters to a Poet:

leaf slick
from fresh rain
drops of dew
slipping
past the iron gate
hardened
sullied and slurping
an unnatural mix of
rain and nutrients for
feeding manicured lawns of
houses hidden behind
placemats and carpools

our stoop, Rodin’s Rock
contemplating questions
that need no answer
Watching waste flow
Traversing and twisting
to a retention pond

Our Refuge

Do our questions follow?
Inquisitions of adolescent angst
Unnecessary, irrelevant already asked
seeping into the soil
allowing the skunk cabbage to sprout

The next poem built on the dialogue in “Seventh Night.” Except I tried to capture the same effct with an internal dialogue

They are all signals. Its about
Balance. Outreach. Contacts
Finding it hard to function when not
in crisis mode
Refresh. A new window. How
can thinking be so in situ? So
outside when I spend so much time
in mine?
Thinking in the cloud.
A band-aid. The glue holding
my code together
Yet when I think. I mean really
Ponder, write. I grasp for my pad
Scribbling. Often illegible; yet so critical
Connected thoughts lost in an
unbroken chain of incomplete links
pulling it closely, Holding tight.
Signals

The last poem was also based off of “Seventh Night.”

This time I tried to imagine a conversation at the end of an event that was filled with antithetical statements:

Spinner

The final note glistened from the ceiling
mocking me
hanging in the air, perched in the rafters as
light floods the room with the
color of thunder. The
masses rise in a cacophony
of silence and he wonders,
wonders as worker bees draped in black
pour from the darkened and dusty curtain which is
stained with past dreams and passions.
Its ruffles witness to the rise and fall of many.
They scamper and he wonders,
wonders if they are more of a collective thought
collapsing tresses, snaking
wires to only hit the road one more time. To travel down
north for that final curtain.
And then he stood to join the herd and he saw her.
Recoiling at first, fearful of a glitter bomb
Her thoughts as scattered as the strategically placed patchwork stitches on purposefully disheveled clothes
“I brought you this,” handing over the sticker, “I have been waiting to meet you.”
“Knowing someone out there owned this sticker.”
“I can find my center, get lost in place, hold in the energy so I can set it free,” I replied my eyes hiding back an exhaustion for desire.
The masses pushed on as burnt sage brush chased misplaced spirits
through a wash of middleclass deficiencies. She continued, “The tension built tonight, so peaceful.” He glanced, wary of one last drive not sure another rider was needed, or wanted.
He said, “Yes the tight spirals and sprawling sounds left me trapped in open space. She looked inquisitive, “Yes an empty space but so full of vibrancy as if the lillies themselves sang to the heaven.” She glanced down at her feet, uncovered and unkempt
the dirt of the chosen poor, and said, “atonal soloing flooded the fog laden synths” and he said,
“Yes misplaced wanderings along the fret quickly slapped down on the bass.” She flirtatiously danced in what little space the masses afforded and said, “I know. The notes were so tight I felt lost so many times.
The doors open and they squeeze by.” Is the strip deserted, shakedown dead?” On horseback and in riot gear, the law was peacefully shuttering economies of size.
She glanced up, height level with steam pouring from a majestic nostril and said, “I guess it is time for the leafs to turn,” and with that he fell off his axis. Only to head north, just one more time.

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We asked everyone to examine the “walks” they share and what it meant to name. Then we explored how naming influenced identity.

Molly Shields challenged us back. She felt our prompts suggested a separation of the text and world. So Molly threw three prompts at us:

Shouldn’t we say, rather, that texts actually make up our world?

In other words, how can an act of reading, writing, living not be part of the world?

Why is there an assumption that naming is apart from the world instead of the world itself, thus separating me from it?

A Confession

I decided to take up this challenge. Now I throw out this confession. I have no formal training in literary theory, semiotics, or linguistics. I have read the thinkings of a variety of perspectives including Bakhtin, Kristeva, Kress, Chomsky. I have Googled Derrida. These efforts were for enjoyment or to fill in gaps in my knowledge. So I am not as well versed as many involved in the #walkmyworld project.

In fact the genesis of my deep explorations into this field was also the genesis of #walkmyworld. It started with Kristeva and intertextuality. Then Sue Pet and I began to explore multimodal poetry through the lens of Rosenblatt’s Response Theory. We quickly found the focus on the “self” too constraining in the theoretical perspective. This drove us to Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia and chronotopes. Thus my reading into what I guess you call linguistic and literary philosophy began.

An interest and not a mastery. I am a mere novice, a padawan turning to Twitter and Google+ as my Master. So I wanted to try Molly’s challenge. This is the result:

I then decided to create a found poem from some of the annotations I made in the texts of literary philosophers. I went through my books both in print and pixel and pulled the quotes. I then rearranged them into a new poem. I could not think of a better way to illustrate the dialogism of online poetry:

polyvalent language
unfixed. There is
no
outside-text
instead
polylogical
multidimensional spaces of
frontiers
within a network
thus
unity is variable
plural,
and relative
Truth is not born but a
separation of self and world
text is a tissue
nodes
is it found?

Image credit: Connections. MT-y. https://www.deviantart.com/art/Connections-143519661

Bike in Kaohsiung(parking)-030 — flickr photo shared by 謝一麟 Chiā,It-lîn under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license

Once again our friends from across the globe amaze us. In fact new poets, learners and readers join #walkmyworld every day. To this end we will no longer publish weekly challenges but will shift the focus to learning events. This will allow folks to step in and out of our burgeoning affinity space.

In the last learning event we asked you to think about what it means to name things, and to consider the power of what you name in the pics you share. We considered what Hass meant when he said, “naming things is a way of establishing your identity through one’s surroundings.”

Many turned to to the the poem “Meditation at Lagunitas.”

I was blown away by the work @dogtrax who created a poetic response. Alecia’s exploration of Lagunitas and blackberries captured what it meant to identify oneself through one’s surroundings. Molly Sheilds challenged my definition of what text means.

We even had Robert Hass reach out to a Kate Booth’s kindergarten class involved in the #walkmyworld project.

Next Learning Event

These are just a few of the amazing things to come out of the last learning event. We will continue to share Hass’s poetry over the next few learning events. We will post a poem and a prompt to spark your thinking.

We will not tell you how to respond. Some may just write a paragraph or two based on the prompts. Others may annotate the poem. I am sure @dogtrax will post a series of poems in response. Molly will issue me another challenge.

The goal is for you to focus on your thoughts, your works, your identities.

Letter to a Poet

A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplishes

his perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California

in the January sun
where families bicycle on Saturday
and the mother with high cheekbones

and coffee-colored iridescent
hair curses her child
in the language of Pushkin–

John, I am dull from
thinking of your pain,
this mimic world

which make us stupid
with the totem griefs
we hope will give us

power to look at trees,
at stones, one brute to another
like poems on a page.

What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind

we survive on. It isn’t much.
You are 4,000 miles away &
this world did not invite us

In your response explore some, all, or none of these prompts:

What words or phrases spoke to you and influence the overall meaning of the poem?

What does this poem suggest about human connections and isolation?

What does Hass suggest about the ways we are, and are not, part of the world?

How do your walks demonstrate a connection or isolation to the natural world?