Welcome to week four of the #WALKMYWORLD project. For the past three weeks you’ve been allowing others to take a “walk” into your “world” using digital texts and tools. This week we begin folding a look at poetry writing and response into our work. As indicated in the first post for this project, this initiative is the latest in a series of projects in which we have used multimodal creation and response as we work with poetry.

The #WALKMYWORLD project is inspired by the life and work of Poet Laureate Robert Hass. We were inspired by the following critique of Field Guide, the first poetry collection by Hass:

Field Guide is a means of naming things, of establishing an identity through one’s surroundings, of translating the natural world into one’s private history. This is a lot to accomplish, yet Robert Hass manages it with clarity and compassion.” Hass confirmed his ability with Praise (1979), his second volume of poems, which won the William Carlos Williams Award. “In many ways,” Gander explained, “Praise addresses the problems implicit in the first book: Can the act of naming the world separate us from the world? How is it possible to bear grief, to accept death, and how can the spirit endure?”

Over the coming weeks, we’ll begin to work our way into the poetry and themes promoted by Robert Hass. As you develop and share your multimodal content for week four of the #WALKMYWORLD project, we ask you to consider the following questions.

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?

By all means, these questions, and the above quote are not meant to fence you in. Over the coming weeks we’ll continue to explore and expand on the life and work of Robert Hass. Feel free to read and share online/offline about these themes as we unpack them collaboratively. For now, we want to begin by introducing you to Robert.

Image CC by Exeter Academy