I was invited to an introduction to creative writing lecture at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL by Beth McDermott. She also talked about her creative writing and visual poetry materials in this interview. Due to Covid-19, I joined her zoom lecture with half of her students from their homes and the other half from the classroom. Despite the long distance, her students explored the concepts of graphic poems. We did a three-minute graphic poetry exercise with pens & pencils (black & white art). Their first drafts were stunning! After the exercise, we also had a short presentation of their graphic poems. The most fun and important part of creating graphic poems is deciding how to chose words and images from the original poem. Fundamentally, there are three choices:
I used Louise Glück's "All Hallows" for this exercise because:
Exercise:
All Hallows Each student selected different parts of Louise Glück's poem. Examples of the students' favorite lines are:
With these lines, they worked on creating their versions of graphic poems. They added visual elements - - some students drew styles similar to contemporary comics - - some explored Glück's meaning of "harvest" - - some connected and adapted their favorite movies or additional images into her poem. The amount of creativity they managed to conjure within three minutes was stunning! In addition, there was a good question about adapting the original into a graphic poem. One student asked how the graphic poet adapts the true meanings of the original poem. My answers were (so far):
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