The Revolutionary Poets Society focuses on global opportunities to respond to the demands of the moment through poetry, music and art. We focus on the development of vocabulary and a set of critical, literacy, and performance approaches to help enable engagement with slam poems and spoken-word poems on aesthetic terms.
The current syllabus for this class is available here. I’m using this website to serve as my learning management system and share all materials. I hope you’ll join us over the coming weeks as we think, discuss, and write.
We’ll use the hashtag #RevolutionaryPoets to organize all materials across social media (mostly Twitter). I’ll encourage my students to share materials and follow along on the discussion there. Please join us.
In our first make, we started with where I begin. In our second make, we talked about where I’m from. In the fifth make, we discussed the shape of my story. Now…let’s get to the fifth make! 🙂
Consider
Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. — Harper Lee
As we examine our own lives, we can usually identify times that we’ve experienced a turning point, or roadblocks of some kind. If we continue to think of our lives as a story, these turning points are usually identified as the climax of the narrative.
The challenge in relating this to our own lives is knowing that the outcome could be positive or negative after the turning point. There is also the challenge of identifying the climax of our story as we’re still living it. It’s also hard to foretell the future and know whether the outcome will be positive or negative before the conclusion of our story.
As you consider a turning point in your life that you’d like to share, please review the video below about Steven Claunch and how he overcame obstacles.
You can review the TED Talk version of this video here. I prefer the version with Steven himself.
Your response
Think of the chain of events in your own story up to this point. What turning point, or roadblock sticks out to you? What challenges have you overcome? Use your voice and the sounds of your world to illustrate the anomalies of your narrative. How could you use sound to define the trials and tribulations you’ve encountered?
Write a poem that shares your response and more context about a turning point in your life. Once again, you can chose to be as honest or veiled in your response as you would like. Please remember the discussions we’ve had up to this point about your digital identity and the ways that you develop it.
Write up this poem and share it on a Google Doc.
Add some complexity
The challenge in relating this to our own lives is knowing that the outcome could be positive or negative after the turning point. There is also the challenge of identifying the climax of our story as we’re still living it. It’s also hard to foretell the future and know whether the outcome will be positive or negative before the conclusion of our story.
An example of this comes from the artist Lecrae. In his song Outsiders, he discusses the challenges in his life, and being an anomaly in the system. Within these confines, he chooses to deviate from expectations and create his own path.
#revolutionarypoets Upon the point of turn … a poem for the latest make …. #smallpoems