and am a mentor in the certificate program in creative writing at Trent University
http://www.trentu.ca/continuing education
Have Fun!
Create your own poem at:
http://leo.oise.utoronto.ca/~towen/wiersg.html
photo © Jesse Klein
Here's a little piece I wrote about my experience teaching on line with WIER.
When I was in
grade ten we had a book fair at my school, and in a noisy gymnasium smelling of
sneakers and basketballs I bought my very first volume of poetry: Leonard
Cohen's Selected Poems 1956-1968. I
still have it, inscribed in pencil on the title page with the now impossibly
modest price of $2.95. Shortly thereafter, I wrote an essay on the poem "A
Kite Is A Victim," the first time I'd ever written anything about a living
poet--and more remarkably, a poet living in Montreal, like me. I already
wanted to be a poet although I didn't know anyone who wrote poetry. But here was this guy,
living a few blocks away, the son of one of my grandmother's friends; he'd even
gone to high school with my cousin, back when he had bad skin and tried to
impress girls by playing the guitar
I also played the guitar, although my skin wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Leonard became a beacon of hope in the dark world of adolescence. I could be saved by poetry, as he had been! I could survive by writing. I would do exactly what Leonard said:
I also played the guitar, although my skin wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Leonard became a beacon of hope in the dark world of adolescence. I could be saved by poetry, as he had been! I could survive by writing. I would do exactly what Leonard said:
pray the whole cold night night
under the travelling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric
The words of
others have always been a lifeline for writers. We find each
other in
libraries, in cafés, in classrooms, in bookstores. We
share our work and our
dreams; we edit, encourage and inspire. And now, with WIER, we
can do it all
long distance, from coast to coast, as fast as we can type. Kids
who want to be
poets can send their work to professional writers and get an immediate
response--something I never could have imagined back when I was
sixteen. It's a new
variation on the old theme of apprenticeship, and an entirely
appropriate one
in the millennial global village.
The risk of this long-distance encounter is that, in the absence of body language, inflection, and eye contact, feelings can be hurt or advice be misunderstood. So we have to write better; to be absolutely clear in our responses to each other, to anticipate and deflect possible misunderstandings. Oddly enough, what I've found with WIER, is that having to rely on a written response has made me refine my teaching skills because I haven't got the front-of-the-class mantle of authority, all I have is the persuasiveness and empathy of my analysis.
It's ironic, in a way, that I've been able to focus so much on the actual writing because my first experience of WIER was undermined by an unrelated computer virus that made work a misery of waiting on hold for experts to give me the wrong advice, deleting and reinstalling programmes, and so on. To be honest, I spent most of the term in a techno-rage. And yet the actual time spent reading and responding to work occurred in a medieval purity of contemplating the words on the page. So although there is one kind of loss when we don't speak together in a room, there is also a benefit to this impersonal scrutiny, to having the work seen only for itself, by itself, by people whose common interest is words. The voice on the page, singing for us alone, as Leonard Cohen sang for me alone in that crowded gymnasium when I was 16.
The risk of this long-distance encounter is that, in the absence of body language, inflection, and eye contact, feelings can be hurt or advice be misunderstood. So we have to write better; to be absolutely clear in our responses to each other, to anticipate and deflect possible misunderstandings. Oddly enough, what I've found with WIER, is that having to rely on a written response has made me refine my teaching skills because I haven't got the front-of-the-class mantle of authority, all I have is the persuasiveness and empathy of my analysis.
It's ironic, in a way, that I've been able to focus so much on the actual writing because my first experience of WIER was undermined by an unrelated computer virus that made work a misery of waiting on hold for experts to give me the wrong advice, deleting and reinstalling programmes, and so on. To be honest, I spent most of the term in a techno-rage. And yet the actual time spent reading and responding to work occurred in a medieval purity of contemplating the words on the page. So although there is one kind of loss when we don't speak together in a room, there is also a benefit to this impersonal scrutiny, to having the work seen only for itself, by itself, by people whose common interest is words. The voice on the page, singing for us alone, as Leonard Cohen sang for me alone in that crowded gymnasium when I was 16.
© Susan Glickman 2001
