Tag Archives: prose

Visual Poems

 

Like most people, before I learned to read and write, I taught myself to draw. How easy to pick up a crayon, a magic marker, or a pencil, and make something—anything—on the page (or on the living room wall). As children, we confidently draw what we want to see and what we see, as we see it. Our drawings are not wrong, misspelled or illegible—and if they are illegible, it’s often the kind of illegibility that one reads as poetic, abstract, mysterious, and open to interpretation. Thankfully, we don’t need to speak an artist’s national tongue to read his visual work. Everyone is capable of reading a painting by Rothko or a sculpture by Brancusi, sans translation.

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A Flash of Memory

In January of last year I began a nonfiction-writing residency at a  high school, here in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.  At an early point during the residency as a teaching artist, I asked my students to explore a memory.  What I meant essentially, when I asked for an exploration, when I asked the students to use or employ their memories, a flash of a memory, a blink or spark from the corridors behind their collective eyes, was supposed to be rather simple.  Pick or choose a moment within an event and use that moment like a flash card.  Put that moment to work as a piece of a scaffold or, as a bone  in the structure of a larger narrative.

From the onset of the residency, my goal was to have the students produce a collection of nonfiction pieces for our year-end anthology.  The idea was to transform a memory from a fact or group of facts into a central thread in a narrative.  I gave them an example, from my own days in high school, from an exceptionally different or perhaps foreign landscape.

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