Introduction to Performance Poetry: Creating Spoken Word & Slam Poetry

1. Introduction: Friends, welcome to this performance poetry Skillshare class. It is my absolute delight to come and share with you a whole lot of the creative process that I have developed over the last 12 years of being a full-time internationally touring performance problem. I live here in Melbourne, Australia. From here have traveled the world over through the US and Canada and UK and Europe and New Zealand and all through Australia. My life for the last 12 years has been writing and performing poetry. And I want to share with you over this class what that could look like for you as you begin to engage in the creative process. How can you go from having a blank sheet of paper all the way through to having something that you are proud to stand up and perform. I'm going to take you through my own creative process of the inspiration, where we get inspiration from and what that looks like to the creation, the initial dumping down of thoughts and ideas and emotions and hard onto the page through the construction, how we craft that up then into a poetry pace and then the invitation. How do we invite people into the performance, the experience of it? We're gonna go through my four-part creative process in detail. And you guys, as we go through, I'm gonna give you different prompts and exercises all the way through. That's going to allow you to come out of this class with a polished, honed, crafted, edited performance piece that you could stand up and deliver and share to communicate whatever is on your heart to share. This is the performance poetry Skillshare class, and I'm so excited that you might join us. He did discover the power of poetry. Not just, not just as a creative form, but as a creative form that can change your life and a creative form that can change the world around us. Would you join me in this wonderful class where we get to write poetry, perform poetry together. 2. Lesson 1A: What's the Point?: Welcome to this poetry workshop. My name is Joel Makari. I'm gonna be your host throughout our time together. I'm gonna be sharing some of my own poetry. I'm gonna get you guys to write some poetry and some further on lessons. This is a time when we get to talk about poetry engaged with poetry rots and poetry, it's gonna be a wonderful time. Hopefully. Maybe you're sitting there and you're thinking, why would, why would someone even do poetry like what the heck? My life is dedicated to poetry. I do poetry everywhere all over the world. Allowed when I can travel, I get to travel all over the place, like to share my poetry in theaters and cottons and cafes from the Sydney Opera House to prisons and juvenile justice centers, indigenous communities, refugee communities all over the place. I brought my poetry and then I work out the best way to perform my poetry on a, on a performance poet mainly, but I also have a whole lot of written stuff as well. But why would I even do this? Why would someone get up and dedicate them laugh to poetry, things a really strange thing to do, doesn't it? I thought poetry was just something you've forced to do in English class or we feel homeschooling right now, sitting at home doing online learning. I wonder, why would someone do poetry? Maybe this can be your first little thing. If you look down at your worksheet, I'm then throughout these videos It's going to say pause in a second. And when it says pause and when it gives you a question, I want you to pause it. I want you to write down your answer on that worksheet. Why? Why would someone do poetry? What's the point of poetry? That's the question. Pause and do that. What I'd love to do for you today is I want to share some poetry with you. A few paces of my own poetry. I'm gonna start with one just to get us in poetry mode in poetry zone. And maybe afterwards you can write a little bit down about what you think this poem means. What's the point of this specific poem? It's a poem that's called ugly words. It's about expectations and pressure, and it's about elephants as well. The word should is an ugly word. So if the word moist to anything, so it's disgusting, moist unless it's in relation to a moist chocolate cake. But you don't get to walk up to someone and say, that's a lovely moist handshake, you have the, we just don't do that moist. It's disgusting also the word pass is really gross and festering and crusty and mucus and all these gross words. So there's nothing more disgusting than, than a posse cross the pimple. That explodes justice. You walk past someone with an open mouth and it goes into the back of your throat. Should is even unbelief. The word should. I should be more like him or I should look more like her. I should do this, I should do that or should have gotten over this by now. Should is a chain downward, a ball and chain word, a shackle around the ankle. Seeing the circus. What an elephant is, xian, it is pinned to the ground by a small wooden peg. It is held there China around its leg and it pulls but cannot break free. So it grows as a slave, tie down. It looks around and walks around in circles. When they say elephant is old, looking then be held in the same way. One small wooden peg, one China around the leg is all that is needed to hold down a ten foot tall, 5 thousand kilogram mountain of an animal that could tear a hole, trade from its roots. Walks around and walks around a ten packet toothpick in the ground. It is the worst kind of slave master because it is alive. I pretense. And this is what makes it all the more sinister. You say We believe the string around our own ankles to be made of unbreakable silver. You pull a little tighter and you will see that chain will break. The elephant doesn't even bother. And most of the time, not a y. I walk around, I walk around. Tied to the ground, showed is an ugly word, is damaged. So it is hopeless always I'm such a loser. Good enough. I've never this enough. Remember that enough. These are ugly words stuck in the back of your throat woods. They are Chain gang words. They are tent peg words hammered into the ground to keep us captive. Don't we all have our circuits masters? This? Well, this is not an animal rights poll. But perhaps it should say it's time to let the elephants for I'm talking stamp L0. You don't talk in Rumble in the Jungle. I'm talking Dumbo is tell me. If you still have those, is big enough to fly away. Telling me that elephant legs can still try bones when they need to. Tell me that I couldn't find freedom in their stump. Swinging Trump's to a new sound, normal circus music and balancing on a bold, too small for who you truly are. Find the open fields, find the elephant paths, learn to live again, not get tied to the ground by there, I believe words throw down their ugly words, cost of their ugly words. There is no doubt in my mind why a group of elephants called a parade. See you walk. You chin, Hi You. Trunk high. You tell the world you will no longer listen to the ugly words that they throw at you. You stand up and you say, elephant will no longer listen to all that ties me down. And then you, then you tell yourself that you will know that I'm going to listen to the words that you say about yourself. You look at who you are and say, This isn't me. And I will never backed down from who I could be. No words will have a timing down. No things will ever bring me down to the ground, chain to the ground. I have me and I will be free. You stand up and declare this is who I am and my old those things that you once thought discount to do that you once thought held you down to the ground, may they be the very things that you build your life upon, who you are? Matters. Gave yourself to them. Give yourself to that. Break free. My elephant friends, break frame. So I wonder what you heard in that poem. What was that poem about for you? He said, The thing with poetry is that the thing I love about poetry is I get to share my story in poetry, things that I'm thinking about and reflecting on. But as I share my story, the joy of poetry is you hear some of your own story within them. I might talk about elephants and ugly words. And perhaps you reflected on some of the ugly words that you say about yourself. And this is the whole point of poetry. Poetry allows us to reflect on who we are, to think about our lives and the things that have shaped us to think about what has made me to be me. Save I can hear some of my own story in someone's poetry. I can then name some things perhaps that I haven't named it before. That poem was about ugly words, the things that tie us down. I wonder what you heard in that poem that made it interesting or engaged. In terms of poetry. Maybe some of the words that I used on my phrasing. Maybe how I performed and how I shared it. I want to review performed or shared a poem like that before. We'll see in a poem performed like that before, when I spend some time. Now if you look down in your worksheet and the idea now and maybe for these next, paul perform another poem in a second, is to do what we call a poetry toolbox. What are some of the tools in the poetry toolbox? And you'll say there's is the written tools and there's the performative tools. As I do this next poem I wanted, you, wanted to still be engaged you with the poem, but also be thinking about what are the different tools and techniques that I use within my poetry to get my message across as much as I can. 3. Lesson 1B: What Matters to You?: This is a poem that's about fences. The first thing that I have a heightened was the electric fence that I peed on as a child was not a fun day. There are off the roll on the two types of people in this world. Those who learn from the others who go before them. Those who just have to go and pay on the fence themselves. I was always the ladder. Since then. It just never really liked fences. The second vents that I came to hate was during my teenagers, it was the corrugated iron variety standing tall behind my hotel in Vanuatu. The peak of the boy face over the top. I wonder who he was. Walked from hotel room past swimming pools across lush green grass, stood on toes to see the boy and his sister. Knee high and rubbish and the scrimmage of desperation I lent on the fence at cut my chest where lush green grass abruptly stopped and the duct of an ugly city began. You say the grass is greener on the other side. When it is way who keep all the water to ourselves. I've never liked fences. Those things that divide us held between us build high to keep them out, to hold us in. But holding is not really the rocks would fences, they do not hold us, scare us into rigidity, into security, into a small space. See, I've stood on the Palestinian side of the board are placed hands like a prayer on the mortar where a boy showed me Banksy, but he could not show me his girlfriend for she lived on the other side of the wall, O Israel or Palestine or Montague Capulet to households both alike in dignity from ancient grudge break to new mutiny Where civil blood makes civil hands unclaimed. I've never liked fences. Held up by both sides. Fence. I've walked in Berlin, the wall that was toned down 25 years. The separation from mother, from daughter from child from some I have knelt in Dhaka prison camp hands tone by the barbed wire of genocide. I have stood in Belfast at the piece will. I do not know why we would have a colon and he paced wall, no wall has ever been have you ever been to Wallstreet? Say our fence has not always physical. The fence between top floor management and the beggars on the streets between the haves and the have-nots where the money is and where it is, not. The white picket fence may not be as innocent as we once thought. I'm never lacked fences held up by both sides, the left and the right, thus left white versus black men, thus women, Christian versus ITS was Islam, pro-life versus pro-choice. South voices rise until we hear the cries of those forgotten in the middle of it all. The pregnant teenager who just needs someone to love. We fought our wars and forget the people. And so I have picked up too many bodies riddled with too many bullets that had been fired by my own gun, killed by my own tongue. I defended by my own gun on defendable night I'm done. They say that we shouldn't sit on the fence. I'm wondering if this is exactly where we shouldn't be between force and retaliation between us and them, them and ask between the violence about arguments between that, which demarcates what his mind from what is yours, the old land from my my land from anywhere must be better than this. Let us sit on the fence. Not with Twitter and thumbs and no opinion but we bandages for the broken with hammer and with acts to swing, to swing to swing until these walls are torn down. Let us give ourselves to each other. Let us give ourselves to each other. This is who we could be without all these fences. Once again, I wonder what you heard in that poll. What did that poem mean to you? What was it about where I had it down? And also, what did you hear? What was the poetic tools and devices that I used in that poem? Have a look through those with my poetry. Him. I'm trying to communicate something on, I tried to talk about the things that matter. But what I wonder maybe you noticed is that all right, I just come and preach to you about the things that I'm thinking about. Instead, I do something different. Instead I use poetry in a way that tells a story. In a way that uses imagery to try to connect deeper message, something that is important to the audience, to you who are listening to my poetry. And so within that poem then, what was I talking about? The kind of the common theme, the common thread really, the common imagery thread that went throughout it was fences. You can see the fences, you could say male and all these different fences all over the world. You can picture that right there. The fame I talked about in the fame by talking about the imagery, say this is the thing with poetry. Poetry is trying to do. Poetry is trying to talk about the big things of life, about love and joy and suffering and pain and injustice and all these things that are caught hard to talk about. The things that we call abstract or conceptual abstract things, the things that we can't say, they're not material, physical things. We want to communicate and talk about those things. But how do we do that? How do I talk about love? Like I can say love is, love is painful. Some of you might be sitting there and you got dumped on the weekend and you'll knock. I know how painful loved convey. But most of you are probably like, what am I? But instead, what if I say, you know, what love is? Love is a bloody miracle. Punchthrough. My ribs cracking my spine splattering my guts against the back wall. That's a bit more visible, isn't it? You can see it. You see this happening to my insides. You like, Oh, what if I said, you know, what love is? Love? Love is enough that cobs me allo love is not that cobs me holla, you can feel the pain of that conchae. I don't even need to say love is painful because I've used imagery and knocked that cobs me hollow to express the emptiness when you've lost someone. This is what poetry tries to do. A, tries to take the big things of life and bring them down small enough, using story and imagery that we can connect to them. It connects the abstract with the material abstract themes, abstract things and concepts. We've talking about these deep things, but the way we're doing it is we're using concrete imagery and stories. We're using our five senses. Our five senses are really key with poetry in future lessons I'm gonna be sharing about our five senses mole. But for now, have a think about that. What I wonder what you would want to communicate. Wonder what you would want to talk about. What are the things that make you mad and sad and angry and proud and wonder when you look at it, our world, what do you say in a lac? I hide that this happens in our height that people are treated like this. That people are left on an island after they escaped from a war-torn country and we put them in a prison on an island. That's so unfair. I wanted, I want to use my voice to talk about that. That's what poetry is about. It's talking about these things that matter. What would you talk about? What would you talk about? What matters to you? 4. Lesson 1C: Poetry and Cartography: Poetry is one of those things that we get to express ourselves. We get to express our emotions and what's happening in our lives. When we get to reflect on the world around us, there's something beautiful that happens as we're doing. Something beautiful that happens both ways. I changed and the world around us can be changed. In fact, I have a whole bunch of friends, many people I wouldn't know who would say that poetry saved their life. Literally saved their life friends, perhaps who had been suicidal, friends who were like, I didn't know what to do. And I pulled out a book and pen. I started rotting from the hard about what was happening for them. Poetry. It's kinda, it's kinda like we've got this balloon inside us. And the staff of Locke happens like the balloon just gets bigger, bigger, bigger and bigger and bigger. And sometimes that feels like it's going to pop. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. Like the insides again, pop from stuff happening at home or at school or with friends or whatever it might be. Or perhaps it's just those ugly words that you say about yourself would just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Poetry is a way to let out some of that. That's what poetry does in the letting out of the air. And absolutely can save our lives. I don't want you to ever think poetry is just some boring thing that we have to do in school. It would force to do in school in English class. Poetry can actually save you a lot when you're going through something hot. When you're going through a really challenging time, would encourage you pull out a pen and paper, write some words down, get some poetry down. I promise you that it's going to help. I'm gonna show you in some future lessons in this series how to actually get that poetry down in a really wonderful way. But poetry not only can save at our own lives, poetry I believe can save on time. Well, the words that we use to express assets. I've seen so many poems going around the plants out in the moment. As we are in the middle of this coronavirus pandemic around the world. So many of my friends have been turning to poetry to find consolation and hailing. We turn to poetry, to stories, to songs, to creativity, to movies. Often when kras has happened in our lives, often when crosses happening now, well, think of when I say these words, I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged the color of this scheme, but on the content of their character. What am I saying? What speech and my saying? Martin Luther King's, I Have a Dream speech. And if you look at that space, which you must do, go to YouTube and look at now if you haven't seen it before. It's one of the most famous speeches ever in the history of our whole world. And it's right there and you can see it on YouTube. Go and watch this speech. And what you would say this whole speech is poetry. It's poetry, it's filled with repetition and allegory. And, and he shares that lack of performance poet with rhythm and with intensity and all these different things. It's a parliament. It changed. It changed how America talked about rice. And it was poetry that didn't. Poetry can save allies and can save the world. This is the end of our first session. Let me share one final poem. As we go, as we finish off this session, what I'll do is I'm going to apply a poem for you. And this poem that I'll show you, it's how I've taken. What you'll see is a poem that I wrote. I took in that I developed it into a performance pace. I took that performance pasting, developed that with music and with, as a video, as a movie. Once sort of girl empty herself out upon an African in tiers and the paperwork, screwed it up, throw it in the bin, and walked away. I could not help myself, reached in my hand, took out her crumpled story later gently upon the table. Paper is a precious thing. It is willing, it takes in upon itself are very wounds, are very wishes as splotch and splatter the blood of ink on paper spoke lyrics like spilled milk, spilled rhythms, spit rhymes. She spoke this time, so I went over the words, studied the contours, crumpled napkins, poetry spilt as mountains on patch. A deep lake and the cup through River Valley where the loan me wonder. For us to, guided only by the map of mucus built on napkin, I found myself walking the edges of cartography is built on the premise. The reality can be modern. The stretch of a landscape laid flat out on the pipe Bobby, cellular. Ships are across the ocean is our imagination and the wind that fills our sales is something that we know but can barely even name, yet. It drives us it forward. A gale that began inside us. Every word is an Ireland, every story is a mountain. Every time I speak, I am drawing this wold for you. I am setting sail and navigation. We are the map makers tracing lines of a land that others cannot see, the uncharted and the unresolved. There be dragons here. There'll be shadow, a nightmare. They'd be wonders there be more beauty than you can contain. Direction the way through a rider, a cartographer, they are one and the same circle. It'll be curious with one row with me. See artistry where others only see ugly. Pick up the patch. Crumpled paper thrown into the way spilling. See it for what it is. To find your way on. Sale. Comes sale. 5. Lesson 2A: The Creative Process: And then you try to get you refer this back. Welcome back to the second lesson, the owl poetry writing workshops together. You've just heard me perform some poetry saint of poetry video by me. You've got your poetry toolbox that you've been working on. What we're going to head towards now is actually getting you to rot some poetry. Some of you will own poetry, which is very exciting. And once again, I'm sure there's a bunch of you sitting there going, Oh, writing poetry, this is gonna be Hod. Who finds it hard to write poetry? Do you find it hard to write poetry? I want you to write down the first thing on your next worksheet there. What, what makes poetry writing hard? Why is it hard for you? Because I'm sure for all It's hard for me. And I've been a pilot for the last full-time for the last 1213, something yeas. What makes it hard for you? What is it? Why is it hard to write poetry? Write that down in your worksheet. So now what I want to begin to share with you is, is my own poetry writing process. How do I go from having nothing all the way through to what I did for you in the last lesson to performing crafted honed poetry pace, how do I go from 0 to having all of that? That's what I wanted to begin to share with you guys, to share my poetry writing process. And there's four key parts to it that I want to look at. I'm going to get us to do some different activities and reflect on in a few different ways for k parts, whether you're ready to write these down, I'm going to put them up on the screen. First section, the first thing, the first process for me is inspiration. Where do I get my inspiration from? How do we get inspired to ride out poetry? The second one is creation. How do we create art poetry? How do we take what is inside? That's what we've been inspired by and get it down on the paper. How do we flow creatively? The third one is construction. How do we take what we've just created and construct a poem out of it? How do we hone at an editor and work with it and change it to make the best poem that we can. And lastly, is what I call invitation, which is inviting people into the performance of your poem. Be it up performance poem or a poem that you've written that someone would read. Both of these take inviting people into this very sacred space where you're sharing of yourself some of the deepest stuff about your life and your reflections on the weld. It really takes an invitation to let people come in. We've got the four of them, their inspiration, creation, construction, and invitation. As we do this now what I'd really love you to notice is that we start with inspiration and then creation and then constructing the actual poem. Constructing the actual poem is our third step, as in sitting there and editing and going all that's not very good at all. Let me change this. That's our third step. This is one of the reasons why I think, we think poetry writing is so hard because most of us, we actually start at the third step rather than at the first. We start. We sit there and we're like, Oh, maybe this is your inner monologue. He told me if this is your inner monologue, you're locked. You can't go to write a poem. I couldn't do that. No, that's not very good. What should I do? And then about half an hour passes and you'll still get something. You gotta cal write something down. Let me write that maybe these NADH and we rub it out, you will rise it out and that's crap. Maybe I could not. Poetry meant to have like, like syllables, like certain amount of syllables didn't. Poetry writing so hard. Is that the inner monologue of some of you? Sometimes that's my inner monologue. Say what we're doing straight up. We're getting coding out editing Brian, editing is part of the construction phase. It's a very different way of thinking to creating. Creative flow is a very different part of our Brian, even that's used then when we're sitting and editing and constructing the poem, most of a stop thinking. This is what a poem should look like. Remember, should is an ugly word. This is what a poem should look like. And so we run it and we're not happy with it. Let me give you the secret to writing poetry. Before we get into the actual writing about poetry that I didn't want to know the secret to writing good poetry. He's a sacred to rotting good poetry. Stop trying to write good poetry. Does that sound wave? That's pretty strange. Either synchronous or writing good poetry is to stop trying to write good. Poetry, Why would I say that? Why would I say it? Lock that? Maybe you can't even write it down. Why would that be on your worksheet there? If the way to write good poetry is to stop trying to write good poetry. Because what happens is we get caught up in editing brains again of what poetry should look like. And we don't think that our work is very good compared to what it's meant to be. So we get stuck, we get stuck at that blank piece of paper. It's what I call the full boding blankness of an empty page. We get stuck there. Let me give you the secret, the actual secret now to writing good poetry so that you don't get stuck. You ready for it. Sacred cirrhotic, good poetry is allowing yourself to write crap poetry. It's as simple as that and as hard as that, it's a simple as that. Writing crap poetry. Who can write crap poetry? Can you write crap? Okay, I can write crap poetry. In fact, I do this all the time. I got to allow myself not to get coding editing Brian, but just to flow out onto the page, whatever wants to come out be a good or bad or right or wrong, that doesn't matter. These first two sections, inspiration and creation, it's all about dumping onto the page. Sometimes I call these steps the dump, dumping onto the page, whatever it wants to come out of me and not worrying whether it's good or bad or right or wrong or anything like that. It's just getting it out there. Not editing, but allowing myself to creatively flow onto the page. And I promise you as you do that, good poetry is going to come out because it'll be crap poetry and that you can take and develop, say, our ADA poem every single day. That's my challenge, my creative challenges to write a poem every single day. Most of that poetry is crap. I'm meant to be a full-time poet who has done this. D's and E's and knees and Iraq crap poetry. Absolutely. In fact, if you talk to anyone who's written he's written books, any author that I've ever spoken to, you know, what they always say? Their first draft was crap. Because it was meant to be, our first drafts are meant to be bad, but we have this idea that if we write something it's meant to be good. See if you can throw that out. Especially you perfectionist who are listening now who have to get something right, see if you can turn down that perfection is screaming voice in your head saying you're not doing it right, It's not good enough, it's not, this is not the turn that off and just allow yourself to create and see what happens. What's the worst that could happen. You could write some crap poetry that no one ever gets to say. That's okay, That's totally fine. What I do, I write my crap poetry. Most of it doesn't get seen by anyone because it's crap. But what I then do, I come back to it awake or two weeks later, I get it out, I start looking at it. I find that there's good stuff in it. And so I scoured through and I'm like, Oh, I could use that part there. That section is really good. That's hopeless. Label that I could use that there and I can bring that into their, Let me bring, and then I begin to construct the poem out of this creative dumping, these credit flowing that I've been doing. 6. Lesson 2B: Inspiration: And then you get these first steps is all about allowing yourself to rot crafted poetry. Let's write some bad poetry together. Hey, let's focus in to start with on the inspiration. Where do we get inspired from the writing of our poetry? There's lots of different places, isn't there? What I want to put to you is we could break them out into two different areas. We can get inspired from the world out there, from the things that are external to us. We can get inspired by the earth, by birds, by flowers, by Clowns, by the things we see in society, by injustices that we see, that we want to speak to get inspired by a conversation that we overheard our neighbors having. We could get inspired by recent events like this coronavirus pandemic that's happening at the moment could be a whole bunch of inspiration to be isolated, to be kept away from each other, to see so many people suffering in our world. This is all inspiration for the writing of poetry. It's all stuff we can use to write down how we're feeling about the world around us. So inspiration comes out of what I would call observation of the external world around us is the first one. And then also it comes out of inspiration comes out of our internal lives. The things we've been failing, things obeying, reflecting on the realities about internal world which some of us, we don't really often think about our inside. Well, do we? We want to just leave that alone sometimes. And especially maybe you're any seven or eight or nine or ten or something like that. Watching this video, perhaps this is something you haven't really even thought about at all. There's a guy named John O'Donohue. He says that poetry is a fascinating conversation with your unknown self. Fascinating conversation with your unknown self. There's a whole lot of stuff about ourselves that we don't know, that we we just ignore when we feel angry or frustrated, when we feel shame, guilt, even fin, joyful feelings, hopeful feelings we saw often just go through life not thinking about anything. There's someone else who once said the quote I heard they said, Is it possible you can leave your whole lot? Never meet the person who is living that life. Poetry is a way to kind of look at yourself in the mirror and got to name some things and say some things about your internal world, about what's happening in your hand. You're hot, and you'll guts. Metaphorically. We've got the two. Inspiration comes from external things and from internal things. Let's start today. What I want to focus on today is the external tomorrow with inspiration and creation, not tomorrow, but our next lesson we'll get into, we'll get into how the internal will look at the internal. Let's start with the external with observation. Now when we observe things, we see people, we hae stories, we see events socially that happened. That we see the world around us, the Earth that is around us. Like like when I go when I believe my front door and go into my car, I just instantly do that and I drive off to work. The between my front door and my car. There are whole worlds there. There's all the stuff happening all over the place. If I would choose to slow down and to say it, to recognize it. It was my son who told me this. My son is about my Sundays five now, when he was first born and started first started crawling around, I would get down on my hands and knees and I'd crawl around with him looking at the world around me and being liked by Sun is seeing this for the very first time. Could you imagine seeing beautiful flowers exploding with color for the first time we're seeing, not just seeing your first ever sunset. That's what my son was getting to see. And I ended up I got a little magnifying glass when he was a little bit older and we would go around and we'd look at the world through the magnifying glass. And it became a bit of a creative practice of mine to go for a walk with a magnifying glass. It forced me to slow down and find the poems that we're waiting for me. That's how I used to say it. I used to say what we do in this part is, let's slow down to find the poems that are waiting for us. But often, often we feel like then if that's the case, will slow down and then there'll be this whole poem that's Whiting fully or it doesn't happen like that. So what I say these days is inspiration comes from slowing down to find the fragments that are waiting for us. Fragments of poetry all around, things that grab our attention. Stories that we overhear, beautiful things that we see, horrific things that we say, all of these things, a little fragments that could come together to become the poems that we run. The things that we see all around us. That's where our inspiration comes from. Write those words down, slow down to find the fragments that are waiting for you. Now as we find these fragments, here's what I want you to do. We're going to do a creative exercise now I want to get you guys doing some writing. What I want you to do is wherever you are when you to stop in a second and look around you and I want you to focus on something that stands out to you in some way. You might have no idea why. Perhaps you could go for a walk even and do this if you're in your room, go for a walk outside into your backyard or something like that. And just whatever what we would say is whatever resonates with you, grab your attention. You might have no idea why it grabs your attention, but I want you to sit with that thing. I want you to observe it. I want you to observe it in as much specific detail as you can. I want you to write these observations down. You could sit with a plant and say, the green leaves of this plant full down around it. There is a stem growing up out of it, a green stem reaching to the sky. On top of the stem is a flower, pink petals. Just very specific observations. As you're writing these observations, say most of the time. Like specificity is something really important with our writing. Record. Most of you guys as Rod as a probably writing something like the dog walked over the road. What we need to get to is using more specific details. So we'd be writing something more like what I mean, what I want to know is what's the name of the dog and what's the dog's further lock and the dog bounding across the road or is the dog limping across the road? Why is the dog limping across the row data, just give me some backstory. I want to know more specific details about the dog is the main gene gross is that is a smooth silky scheme. Using specific detail is really helpful with our poetry. So I want you to get as specific as you can in your observations of this thing. And then I'll want you to, as you then observe it, I want you to start to ask Wondering questions. Start saying Surat some observations down and then say, I wonder, I wonder, what does it make you wonder about? I wonder how these flowers smells. I wonder this kappa that I'm sitting on. I wonder who else has walked on this carpet. I wonder what? When I walked before that, I wonder where fate take us in life. I wonder if carpets gather up all of our memories of our fate and they stole them for us. I want to say these are just random wonderings. What wonderings do they take us to remember? Yes, I remember now my last lesson, I talked about the amazing thing with poetries that connects the abstract themes to concrete materiality, to concrete objects, imagery, stories. When we asked wondering questions, we're moving from the material observation to starting to think thematically or abstractly. When you guys just to go and do that, you can hit pause now go and spend some time with something, right? Some specific observations, and then write down some wonderings that come out of it. That's it. That's the first creative exercise. Press pause and go for it. Come back to the video in a second. 7. Lesson 2C: Pantoum: How did you go? The challenge with writing our poetry is now probably many of you look at what you've done. Any electric, that's crap. It's not even poetry. It's not meant to be poetry memo where it just that they inspiration. We're not about constructing a poem yet, which is getting stuff out. We're being inspired by the world around us. Maybe what you could do muck out how to share this with a friend. You can pause if you want, but maybe you could email this to a friend, we'll get it to a friend and you could read each other's work is one thing you could do now with these, these fragments that you'll writing. Now what's the next one that I want you guys to do? I want to do one more kind of focused activity around this observation thing. Remember, we've just, just slowed down and we've written a poem about something that we have observed out there in the world. And now we're gonna do a second one of these. All right? The second one that I want you to do is a slightly different one. It's a way I loved doing things that are totally freestyle where you just get to write whatever. But there's also, there's some helpful different structures to help us. Some of you might lock structures, some of you might not, but just have applied with this. Remember, we're not trying to write a really good poem. We're just writing whatever wants to come out. What I'd love you to do is again, to go and observe something this time maybe someone will just observed something. What if you go into I didn't know if any of you people watches. I'm sure that there's some every class I go into this, people who admit to this where you'll sit on public transport and you'll just watch people do it as well. I'm, I'm make up stories about them in my head and what's whereas I see there. And I'll write down observations about, I know creepy, I'm at store key creepy, weird person. But all of these comes into the writing of my stories and my poetry. I use what I see out in the world in the writing of my works. I wonder, Could you go? And maybe you can, maybe there's some people in your family that's the easiest one to do it with. Just go and observe them for a little while. Writes them down some observations and write down some wonderings. Wondering, I wonder, what do you want? Maybe, maybe your overhear a conversation they're having. Or you can even go and ask them and say, Can you tell me a story? Can you tell me a story? Wanted a really good one to do with this is two, to say, have you, mom or dad or sister or brother. Tell me the story about that scar. Often we have different scars on our bodies and it's really helpful one to do, say Tell me a story about that scar. And then here's what I want you to do. I want you to go with what you hear and what you've written down and you'll wonderings about it. I want you to write what we call append. To. Append tomb is a structured way of writing a poem. I'm gonna put it up on the screen. Now, what you can see is there's a bunch of different, There's a bunch of different numbers, right? Right down here. You'll have it on your worksheet there, 1234254657687381. This is going to be a 16 line poem. The first one you'll see is the first full lines. They're totally new lines, they're different lines. Remember, the only way to start writing poetry is just to start writing. You might not have any idea how this first line is going to start. But I want you to just to write something anyway. Often, often you won't have an idea, but in the writing of it, something we will begin to come to you. You could start, you could write line one, just say whatever comes out. Remember it can be crap if you want your add a new line two and you'll learn three new line for all about wonderings and this person or this story that you've heard about a scar or whatever it might be, the rotted out for new lines. And then you repeat line two. And then you write a new line five. And then you repeat line for you not write a new line six. Then you repeat line five, write a new lines seven, repeat lines six, routing new line. Then you repeat lines seven, then you repeat line three, then you repeat line eight, and then finally you repaint line one. The poem starts. As you begun. This is called a pen tomb. Go and observe, listen, ask some questions to someone and say again, what comes out of riding a pen tool, I'm just playing with it and have fun. He says, the second part of the observation, observing a second exercise for you to observe the world around you. Go for it. Alright, How did you go with that one? How did you find that process? Well, maybe you could write it down again on your worksheet, how you found that process doing that for some of you, maybe you found it harder for somebody who might be found it easier than writing just the observations in the wonderings to take it that next step into craft that little pain tomb poem type thing up could be a really good thing. This is our second lesson done. Remember what are our four things? We have inspiration, creation, construction, an invitation we've just done the first part of the inspiration. In our next lesson, we're going to look at the second part. I'm gonna connect it up without creation as well. That's why we're going to, it's wonderful to have you here again. 8. Lesson 3A: The Human Potato: Welcome to the next lesson of our poetry writing workshop. Hopefully you got two pieces out yesterday. I remember they didn't have to be good. That would just whatever happens. Hopefully that was the case. Today we're going to continue on without poetry writing yesterday we looked at inspiration, observing the world around us, slowing down to find the fragments that are waiting for us. Now we want to look at how do we do that internally? How do we find inspiration from inside lives? And from there, how can we then move into creation? What is this creation looked like? I said yesterday that I often call this step the creation step, the dump. That it's a dump of whatever is happening inside my hot my gods, my head. I dump it down onto the page. I get it out into the page on Let it come out in whatever way at once. And I don't judge whether it's good or bad or crap or whatever. I just allow myself to run. What I want to show you guys today is a few different ways that I enter into the riding of my poetry. Just like I showed you two different ways with the pen tomb yesterday. And with observing and wondering, I want to look at a few more different ways that we can begin to move into the creating of our poetry. I've moved to the desk now. I want to get us, I want to show you how I do this on the paper here as we go through. So remember, without this whole section that's all about allowing, getting out, about editing brain, allowing ourselves to rot and whenever wants to come out. One of the big ways that we do this without writing is to tap into inside the weld. In a way. It's kind of like the way that I picked your us humans is a little bit lack like an iceberg. Actually, let's not go an iceberg I often talk about, we often do about icebergs as illustrations of humans. Let's just talk about floating. But Tyler is the human is a floating potato. Let me draw a floating potato here. My opinion is not working. Here we go. There's some water floating potato, floating potato rotten there. The human is floating potato. In what way? Well, it's like 20% of who we are sits above the water and 80%, let's say it's below the water. In other words, you can see the top 20% of a potato floating in the water, but you can't see the bottom 80 per cent of it, it's under the water. We're a little bit the same. Say we have 20% that sits above the water, is kind of what everyone gets to see of our lives. It's what we call our projected, projected self. Our project itself, a two-week project out to the world that we are. It's who you are on your social media or on your Snapchats and Instagrams and whatever else. It's how you want people to see you as it's who you are. As you go to school. Say I know because I was once you're age as well, I know that for many of you, you're beginning to feel like a bit of a different person at home as to who you are at school, as maybe to who you are with your mates on the weekend or on the sporting field, or if you go to a church or mosque or something like that in all these different places in our lives. Probably you're feeling like a different person because you're trying to, it's not a bad thing. You're trying to work out who you are. We put on masks to work out who we are and how we engage to project ourselves out to people in a certain way. The problem is that for many of us, we think that that's the totality of who we are. But the reality is that's only 20% of who we are. We know that beneath the water, beneath what other people get to see of us, there is this 80% beneath the water. And it's made up of our hopes and our dreams, the things we love, things were passionate about the things that wounds that have heard us, things people have said staff, those ugly words we say about ourselves just may not have shame and guilt, and joy, and frustration and all of these things that are quite hard to talk about, quite hard to talk about. Sometimes we even need like a failings. We'll, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you a feelings wheel that shows you a bunch of the different other feelings that we have. Deeper feelings that we have, that we don't even realize we have. It's hard to name those things. It's hard to allow ourselves to go under the water. You know what poetry does? Poetry, poetry does. This poetry starts up here and it goes under the water and brings that up. If under the water is made up of all those things, our hopes and dreams and also our wounds. Hertz, what I would say it's made up of two things. Let me draw two circles here. Under the water I think is what I would call are broken. Our broken stuff. Now true stuff, broken stuff. Broken stuff and true stuff. That's this wrestle fighting around inside of it. It's almost like we are true stuff is like the best version of ourselves that we could ever possibly be if nothing bad happened in life. And we just live to our fullest capacity, this is who would be. But we will know the stuff of life happens. And on top of our true stuff, broken stuff. Parents that fight, bullies that say things, self-doubt, the cape seen, the crepe seen all this stuff are broken, stuff gets on top of that, but we don't want to show people that are on top of that. We put out a project and self Poetry is about being willing to look beneath the mask so that projected self to name our broken stuff, to begin to see our true self, who we truly are. Think about the Lord of the Rings, if any of you have seen it. The same way. Gollum, this creature, Gollum is taking Frodo and Sam lies through the Dead Marshes. And there's this beautiful scene where Frodo comes up to guard him and he says, Hey, I know who you are, this twisted, disfigured creature that is Gollum. I know who you are. You will once just like us, you will one of the river folk, you were just like a Hubbert. He says, I know that you have a name, your true name is smuggle. And you see this Gollum creature he's like, he remembers. Poetry is about remembering who we are. There's a guy named Milan can Darrow who says the first step in the destruction of a people is to take away their stories. To take away who they are. It's what we say when we say genocide in the world. In genocide of Australians, Australians, First Nations, indigenous people, we would take away their stories. You're seeing the war with the books that were burned in Berlin. When stories are taken away, it takes away the very depth of what makes us human. And when that happens, we can just treat someone like they're not human and that's what happens in war. We take away their stories. We can treat people how they are. What I'll put to you now though, is if it's true that the first step in the destruction of a people is to take away their stories. And I put to you that the first step, and this is the join once again, and poetry, the power of poetry, the first step in the restoration of a people is the restoring of this story. Remembering that true stuff, who they are. This is what we get to do with our poetry. We get to remember who we really, we've got our projected self out, broken staff at our true stuff and all these parts of ourselves that are wrestling around where they tell the poetry's about 90 min. This confusing mix of all that is inside us. It's about naming these things. So we're gonna go ahead and we're going to do that. 9. Lesson 3B: Wordbanks and Chainlinks: Remember we're just in the creation section now. We're gonna be inspired by our inside lock and we're going to create, the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to do what we call a word bank. Whatever word bank gets on your worksheet there, a word bank. Here's what I want you to do, is I want you to write down a thing we need a thing, we need something that we're going to write about an abstract thing. What I want you to write it, I want you to close your eyes. I want you to pause this now. Close your eyes maybe for a minute. I want you to have a think about actually just close it now you don't even need to pause it. Close your eyes. I want you to have a think about What's the stuff that's been rumbling around inside your life recently? Maybe. How have you felt recently? Maybe anger or happy or sadness or joy or frustration or shame or guilt or hope or what's, what's been rumbling around inside of your inner world of light. You can be as honest as you want with these poetries about being honest. It's about writing down what's actually happening for us going beneath that projected mosque self. You're not going to have to share this with anyone. You might have the opportunity to be. You don't have to share this with people. What would you want to write about? Close your eyes and everything. What's coming up for you? What's a word that you could write down that name, some of these stuff, joy, frustration and anger. All right. I want you to write it down now in the center of your page. If you don't have anything, I feel like I just started and then just write your name down. Write my name down, Joel, in the center of my page here. And then I'm going to stop filling this up a word bank. Maybe Tom yourself, give yourself two minutes right now. I have a stopwatch with you. Go get your phone or something like that. Time itself, two minutes to write down as many words as you can all about, if anything, and everything that comes into your mind when you think about your topic, minds about me. So I'm gonna write, read, entourage, freckles, joyful, passionate, hopeful. There's some things here that are physical things like random freckles, other things that are abstract, things like passionate and hopeful. If you're writing, say your word is hope, maybe you, maybe you're feeling hopeful at moment in the center. Then you write down anything and everything that comes to your mind when you think of the word hope. When I think of the word hope, I think of a river, that's the first thing that comes to mind. I think of like a river churning through Mountain. That's hopeful for me. Churning through mountains. When I think of how I think of happy. I also think of stock. I think of being trapped. The need to get, to feel hope when you're trapped. When I think of hope, I think of leadership. That's what I think of leadership. People who could lead us into hug. You, go ahead and you do yours now two minutes pause this and whatever comes to anything in every dont not write something down, just get as many words as you can around. You'll topic, go for it. You should have all these different words. Now when I do this at home, I'm, I might get 50 words all about my topic all around my, my central word in maybe like five minutes, hopefully you've got more than ten. That's the end. Hopefully you've got more than ten words, they're written around. Some of you might have struggled with that, and that's 9x9. It's all about learning to just allow yourself to rot on the page. I'm not worried about whether it's right or wrong. What we're going to add to this is what's called a chain link. China is one of the ways that we can enter into the writing about poetry. Chain link is where I might circle one of my words. Let's say I circled frequency, Joel. Let's not, let's not go with concrete one. Let's go with a, an abstract on Joel, passionate. Passionate is the first word. What you do with a chain link is think of the very first thing that comes into my head when I think of that word, so it's called word association. So I'll write it here. Joel makes me think of passionate, passionate. First thing comes to my head is passion fruit. Passion fruit. That's just the first thing that came first. Think of them. I have one, I think a passion fruit, I think of seeds. Seeds makes me think of trees. Trees makes me think of leaves. Leaves makes me think of green. Green makes me think of grass. Grass makes me think of mowing. Mowing. Do you get what I'm doing? All I'm doing is write anything, just the very first thing that comes into my head when I think about this next one. So you guys have your theme that you're writing on hope and joy, or passion or fear or whatever it might be in the center, I want you to circle two of the words that you just wrote, two keywords that you just wrote in your word bank, circle those words. And then I want you to do a chain link on each of those to about ten loan, just like I did there. So that's another 20 words you're just enough to add to your page. Got it. I remember. Let your brain wander. Don't try to stick to theme, just write whatever it wants to come. This word makes you think of that would save you can do it as fast as I just did. They just then pause and go for now, let me tell you where we're up to what we have done. We don't have any month. You no longer have a blank piece of paper. You will have pushed past the foreboding blankness of an empty page by allowing yourself just to write whatever wanted to come up. Just as you've done here. You've allowed yourself just to write. So again, when I do this, I might have 50 words and I'm like getting down in five or ten minutes. And then I'll choose five keywords around my topic. And I'll write down another 1010 words on my chain link for those five words, that's another 50 words, 50, 50% words that I've written down there in my word bank. That's a 100 words in about ten or 15 minutes that I have on my page ready to write into my poll a 100 different words. Never again sit there for half an allegory, or what should I write it? How do I start? What should I do? None of this is not just for poetry, this is for anything in school, any creative writing, essay writing to a word bank and do some chain links with it. Instantly you've broken past the full boating blankness of an empty page while we call it a word bank. Because now as we stopped to ride out poll, we can begin to type these words and write some stuff about me having freckles and then being passionate. I can write that in there. It's a bank of words that we can keep coming back to so that we don't get stuck. That's where we're at now, what I want you guys to do now is you have, you've got your theme, you've got an abstract theme in the center. You've got two chain links coming out from two different words that are connected to your thing. What I want us to do is allow our brains to make the connection between a theme and some words that are out on our chain lead. Our brains are really amazing at making these creative connections. How does me being passionate? How does that relate to leaves or green or mowing? I have no idea, but my brain can work it out. My Brian can create beautiful incredible poetry or just crap poetry because we're just writing crap poetry around how being passionate relates to green leaves are traded. So he's how I want you to do this. I want you to write down, write down on your page, write down 123456. At least this is gonna be at least a six line poem. Again, I want you to time yourself and you're gonna give yourself five minutes right now, five minutes total to rot. A sixth line, Paul, if you've got more than six slides, that's fine. Just keep on going with it. You can do a ten line color you want. You can do a 50-line Paul if you want, and don't worry about the time limit. But if you start with, I just want you to write six line polymer. What I want you to do, the whole poem is about your theme. You'll center theme right there. It's about your thing bought. In each line of your poem. You're going to use one of the words that's out on your chain link to write about it. You'll first line, I might have grain in my first line or second line I might have trays. My third line I might have mowing. You notice how it's gonna work out. I want you to time yourself so that's less than a minute per line that you're going to run. I'm going to allow myself to do this right now as well. And I'll show you how crap out poetry can begin already said my poem is gonna be about maybe and passionate. And I'm going to use the words you can use. You've got 20 words. I've just got a few words here, 20 words from your two different timings. Use them within your palm. You're ready, pause and go for it and I'll do the same. How did you go with your writing? Hopefully, you've got your six lines out of something. Perhaps you think it's crap and that doesn't matter. Wherever if you've written something crappy but something to work with, but if you haven't written anything, you've got nothing to work with. So here's my here's my six lines that I bought at all. Just trees growing wild grass stretching as high as we are able. These green beginnings hopeful in their rising, the planting of seeds in the field of freedom. This is what I gave my passion to reach out for. My leaves dance free in the wind. There's my, that's my pace. Maybe that's some stuff in there that I could tank and develop and craft in the next section, the construction section, but I've got something there now and hopefully you do as well. So that's one way that we entered into the writing of our poem, that I entering onto a word bank, a chain link. And out of that, I use my words to bring craft poetry out of it. 10. Lesson 3C: Imagery: We're gonna go onto now another way that we can do this in his creation section. This is one of the key things that we talked about, metaphors and imagery. Little bit. The other thing, the other lesson, I want to focus in on imagery for a little bit. How do we use imagery within the writing of our poetry? Imagery is really, really crucial, remember, because it takes those big abstract concepts and it brings it down so that we can see it. Remember, we're talking about love yesterday. Love is a knife that cobs me. Hello. We can use our five senses to write out imagery. This is what I do, This is how I write my imagery. I have a think you've got a theme, they're not tiny. You've got a theme. Maybe hope on joy, whatever it might be. Mine ended up being me, being passionate. Passion. What is passion? Thyestes line. What does passion smell? Lack if I can smell it? What I want to do with you guys now is I want us to use our five senses. You've got a written there on your worksheet. Sam, touch, taste, smell, our five senses. We're gonna use our five senses to rot what we call extended metaphors. Extended metaphors is really crucial without poetry extended metaphor. A metaphor is where, what's a metaphor? Someone telling me, you can't be watching a video. A metaphor is where we have, where we're talking about something, but we use a physical object to talk about that thing. It's where we smash two things that are normally go together. We smash them together and see how they go together. Like love and a knife, like strawberries and Justice at a store, reason, Justice go in and I have no idea, but that's what imagery on metaphor is about hope and banana peels. Lot of them. We're just going to work out how these things come together by writing one sentence extended metaphor. If we were gonna do an extended one sentence extended metaphor about this pen. Perhaps we would say the pen is, a pen is sold. That's almost cliche, one, that's the one that always comes up straightaway. We can say dependence, a friend, dependents of mountain, dependents of tree dependent. We could actually say anything in this world, couldn't we? Independence a plant to the penny is the ocean depended is a script that's often one because of the black ink and that's like another cliche we often use. The pen is a which is dependent, isn't enough dependents, a star, the pen is a, we can say anything in the world. But now I want to extend this out to a whole sentence. Instead of just saying independence, a soul. And we want to break through that cliche. If you write something that you've heard before, I challenge you, change it. It's really easy when you are in high-school TNF-alpha and things before. And just to leave them, they'd be like, just right. Not allowed is a box of chocolates with all her life in the box and children, we've all heard that before. We push past that dependence a sword, let me push pasta by extending it out to all sentence. The pen is rusty bucket of a sword that I keep in my back pocket, Whiting for the diet that Dragon will arrive. I don't know what that means, but it's kind of interesting. There's some interesting things in there. I could say the pen is the sharpest, sharpest summarized sort in the world that I stab into my knife and I watch the words bleed on my page. Now we're getting somewhere. We're getting into an interesting image. I only see what we do. We take our one words, we extend them out to a whole sentence. I'm going to ask you some, I'm going to ask you some questions right now. I want you to write one sentence extended metaphors to answer these questions. And these questions are about your topic. What about your topic? There are about joy, about hope, about whatever your topic is. I want you to write on the next page, I want you to write joy is or hope is, or freedom is, or sadness is whatever your theme is that you put in the middle of your flow of, in the middle of your word bank. I want you to write that now this something is pain is, I'm going to ask you a series of questions, are going to answer them as one sentence metaphors. You could give it some description, describe this thing, describe what the metaphor is, and some action as well. My first question is, as I ask it, hit pause, give yourself really short amount of time though. Don't get into editing brain. The thing that will stop your writing good metaphors is trying to write good metaphors to strong wherever it wants to come out, hope, ease or joint ears. If your thing was. We're gonna use our five senses are, Let's start with our site sense. If we can see things, you see people, we see objects, we see landscapes. If your thing was a landscape, it hope or joy, whatever it is was a landscape. Landscapes of mountains and deserts and seas and oceans or wherever they might be. If your thing was a landscape, what landscape Would it be? Your writing hope is, have a think is that an ocean? Is it a busy city? Is, what's your thing? Then extend that out to a whole sentence. Frustration is the kid and the alleyway who sits there beating his head against the wall every second of every day. There was just a random thing that came up. You just write whatever it wants to come back. Are you ready? What would your theme bay if it was a landscape polls go for it. We're going to jump straight into our second one. Now, what would you also write joys are hoping is again on the next slide, what would you all Fame be if you will stay with, we'll stick with seeing if it was an object, if it was if it was something in your house, a household appliance, a piece of furniture, whatever it might be. I want you to pause and write down hope is, if it was an object, something in your house, go from one sentence pose. Now we're going to go straight to our next one as well. We also have people, we see people without eyes. If your thing was a person, if hot, shame was a person, who would they be? That would be the athlete that's being taking steroids. Shame is an athlete taking steroids. That's interesting. Guilt. Guilt is a judge who has been stealing from the corner shop. These are just random ones. Who would your thing Bay as a person. One sentence pause, go for. Alright, now we're gonna go to the next one. Our next sense is Ramya just riding on the next slide, sir, I hope is joyous frustration is whatever you're writing on the next slide. If your thing was, we're going to annex sense sound. If you could hear your thing, if it was, if it was a musical instrument, what musical instrument would obey? Pause, go for it. We're going to jump straight into the next one. If your thing. Now let's go with feeling. If you could feel that if you were standing in the middle of a field and there was a weather all around. What's the weather? What would your theme be as whether God for it? Write that down one sentence. All right, Let's just do one final one. We'll just bring food, smell together on Thyestes and smelled together because they kind of very connected. Anyway, if you'll thing was food, if you'll thing was food. That's our last one. What food would be one sentence. Go for it. Okay. Well, you guys are doing some hard work. I am getting you to work hard today. You now have six different things. I think we did six of them that you've written down that I want you to circle. The one you liked the most, so-called that extended metaphor that you liked the most. And then I'm going to give you the major way that I process that I enter in that the manager process for this creation section. I've got the one you like the most. Have you got it? Pulls and get it. Now if you've got that one, I want you to start with that image. Then you're gonna do what we call flow of conscious writing. Flow of conscious riding is where you put pen to paper. If you start writing, you'll pen is not allowed to stop writing. It helps us to get out of editing Brian and just rot whatever wants to come out. What you're gonna do, you're gonna challenge yourself. If you've got a book, lack of base, you'll want to do a whole page of flow of conscious writing. Without your pen stopping, you would start, you've started with joy is the desert that I walked through, whatever it might be. I want you to start with that sentence. You don't need to write it again. You can just start at the end of that and then just keep on writing, going. If it was a desert going into that visit, be their experience and write about revenue rotting about your theme. Theme, hope, frustration wherever it might be. But you're going to use this image, you're going to extend it out. Remember, from back to that first lesson where I shared my poetry with you, that one about ugly words that palm about elephants. All that poem was started as it was four pages of flow of conscious writing all about my life as an elephant trapped at the circus. That's what that poem began ads. Then I took that and I constructed it up as a poem, which we'll do in the next lesson. For you now, sit there, flow of conscious writing. Start with this. Just delve into that one that you like the most that would most, you could most delve into. Use your five senses within there. See how you go. One page for conscious running if you want to do two pages or three pages, just keep on going. Maybe do five or even ten minutes time yourself if that's gonna help weigh your pen is not allowed to stop moving. You're just going to write whatever wants to come out developing this idea, going back and forth between your abstract theme and this image that you're using. Look at this same through the eyes of the image in lots of different ways. You will time stopped, press pause now and go for it. How did you go? That's a hard one, isn't it? About a joyful onto, I hope you'll let you actually, I wonder who have you actually enjoyed writing like these writing that flow of conscious found who? I wonder who found a flow? Did you find a flow in your writing? Did you find this point where it was just coming out of you? Hopefully, you're tapping into that full conscious writing for me. As I said, it's my main process than I stopped my creation with. I would challenge you if you're gonna write a poem, do why don't you do one page two, page three pages of flow of conscious writing that you can then type in develop out of. Today, you've done a whole lot of writing today already. We're gonna finish up now. You've done really, really well. Make sure you keep this work because we're gonna take it and developing tomorrow's lesson. Well done. 11. Lesson 4A: Feel the Rhyme: Here you are. You've made it to the fourth lesson of our poetry writing workshops together, I hope you've got a whole bunch of riding out there. In fact, you do, you've got heaps of writing that you've already created. You have your two pieces from the inspiration that our observations and our wonderings. Two pieces from that. You've also got your word bank, your chain links. The piece of writing that came out of those chain links. You have your six extended metaphors. You have your flow of conscious piece of writing. That's a whole lot. I'm going to get you to do one more piece of writing to add to S suite that we have here. I want you to do one more flow of conscious piece overwriting. These flow of conscious piece of writing, we've talked a lot about what we did one last time on imagery. I want you to focus in this time just to start with, I want you to focus in and do one on Greek because we've been running around a theme about how we've felt recently or what's been happening inside us recently. We haven't really focused in on how it actually impacts us. This thing. What I want you to do, I want you to write, I feel the next line of the orbit of your paper there. I feel, I don't want you to write about how does this theme that you're writing about, how does it actually affect you? I want you to save, Save. You can write something around that now. Something that I haven't talked about that I want to put to you. It's really interesting that in poetry often we think of poetry as words as poems have to have rhyming in them. We haven't talked about rhyming this whole time, halfway. Rhyming, absolutely. Some of my poetry has a rhyming in, but what you'll notice is it's not that the last word on each line runs. It's not like didn't didn't didn't wrapped in incident that cat sat or anything like that. When Ram's happen like that, That's a rhyming couplet. I might be in a different form, AB, AB, the last word on each line, rhymes. I don't want you to do that kind of poetry. You've been writing some stuff, maybe some of it's come out like that and that's totally fine. But what I'm helping you to do is to break past that because that's the first thing that we often think of when we think about poetry. One of the ways that we can include that we can, we can do to bring in a different form of rhyming. Rhyming is simply repetition of the vowel sound. When we repeat the consonant sound, all that consonants we might have repetition of the constant is what we call alliteration. So it's Peter Piper picked up posse pimple, put it in, he's putting a night for dinner. That's alliteration. Rhyming is also what we call assonance. Assonance repetition of the vowel sound. What I want you to do. And the way that we can do this, instead of just having that repetition at the end of the line. What you'll notice in my poetry works is that actually I have rhyming scattered throughout. It's what we call an internal rhyme structure. It's what rappers use as well. And it means that it flows a lot easier because instead of writing that infinite didn't bulb didn't, didn't whatsover, whether I'm doing Bob slob I will just for Slobin, probably you found yourself doing that with poetry. You force him arrive. And because of that, it sounds forced. It sounds are often high school is when they write these rhyming couplets. Kind of sounds like you're in primary school writing poetry. What I want to encourage you is not to do those rhyming couplets, not to rhyme at the end if you like rhyming, what a, my challenges as you do this piece of flow of consciousness, naturally see if internal rhyme structure happened. What this looks like is that it could be that the second word he rhymes with has the same vowel sound rhymes with the fourth word on that, on that first line, that Rob did the third word on the next slide. And then this word he might rhyme with that word there, which I was with the next word on down on the next slide. Who knows any it's scattered throughout. So one of my poems starts like this. He writes poems beneath the underpass and he wonders how fast they'll cost him this time is just another fat dog. No hope too much skin, never gonna be thin, is about to begin another school, another day. Another way that he wished he could melt into the pavement. That's one of my poems begins like that. And hopefully what you heard in that is that scattered rhymes structure. What you can do the way that this comes out, it's not by forcing it, by forcing yourself to have to have a Ryan. But as you right now as you write your I feel peace. I want you to see if naturally as you're going, there might be the third word might rhyme with the fifth word or a six-word white rhyme with a word somewhere on the next slide or however it works, you just see if it naturally happens. See if you can have that in the back of your mind. Internal rhyme structure as you're doing this kind of flow of conscious rhyming, see if he can pick up a little bit on some of the rhyming in it, but not at the end of the lines just scattered throughout. That's the extra challenge with this, a little piece of flow of conscious writing. You're writing, you're gonna pause it now and you're gonna have five or ten minutes. Once again, save, you could do whatever you can do a whole page to two pages. I feel. How do you, how does this topic, this theme that you're writing about, how does it actually impact you in your life? I feel go for it, start writing and see if any internal rhyme structure happens. 12. Lesson 4B: Construction: Alright, so now you have a whole lot of writing that you have done. You've got those two flow of conscious pieces of writing. You've got the piece of writing that came from your word bank and your chain link. And then the piece of writing connected to that. You've got two pieces of observational writing that you've done what a pain tomb. And one, just observing something out in the world. Lots and lots of writing the id. Now we reenact construction time, now we've come to construction. This is where we take all that we've done. This is where I moved from the page to the computer, is where I go to the computer and I start scouring through our workout. What's the best stuff that I could take from all that I've done and bring it into the computer. How can I begin to construct my poem up line by line from what I've done, I scour through one of the, one of the best ways and easiest ways to do this is what we call a hook palm. You can construct your palm up in any kind of way. It could be a letter to someone. It could be, it could be kind of like a song, like a verse chorus, verse chorus. However you want to do that could just be a story. It could be striped free flow of conscious as you've written them down there, you might just take that and edit that a little bit. However you want to. One of the easy ways to do it is what's called a hook poem. Hook poem is where you're going to go through and this is what I want you to do now, go through all that writing that you've done in these last lessons. A whole lot of writing pages of running go through. I want you to find that key phrase that would become a point of repetition. What you do with a hook palm is you have that phrase that would really hook people and grab people. And then you would have a paragraph, water stanza one, and then you repeat the hook again. You have the same hook in your paragraph to repeat the hook again. So think back to the poems that I did for you at the start. Should is an ugly word. That was my hook that I had in that first poem surely is an ugly word. Then I had a paragraph about other ugly words like moist and crusty. There's kind of a funny introductory thing. And then I said the words again, surely is an ugly word. And that's when I talked about the elephant trapped at the circuits short is an ugly word. That's when I linked my life being lack that elephant trapped at the circus. I had done all these files conscious writing and then I shaped it all around the idea of this hook, it gives you something to kind of thread your whole poem around, to construct your whole poem around. My other one was the other one I did for you fences. I've never liked offenses. I said that a few times throughout the poem that I did, there was about four or five times I'd have the hook. I've never liked fences, paragraph, hook, etc. You could do a hook. You might find your hook in all your work and then you on paragraph might be something from the I feel piece of writing that you just did. Then you have your hook again and then you could bring in maybe two or three of your extended manifolds, have your hook again. And then you could bring in that big long extended metaphor, that flow of conscious that you did, however you want to do it, you go through, you work out the best way that you can take all of these creative flowing and dumping that you've done and now crafted opposite poem. What I would say is we wrote in the terms of a bunch of those were like hope is justices, blah, blah. I don't want your hook to be like hope is or joy. Is it make it more creative? Grabbed something out of it. In fact, don't even, maybe don't even use those words. Hope is or joys or frustration is, or justice is in your poem. Do that was to give you a base. But you want to go through, find that hook, that point of repetition, put it down, and then start bringing in the other stuff around, all around that hook. And you'll begin to see a whole constructed poem come to be. I want you to pause now, and I want you to give yourself a bunch of time to do this. I'm talking like half an hour. It might take you or just do a little bit then as we come back in half an hour of time on editing. And that will be this lesson down. But I want you to really take all web data and see if you can construct out of all these things. Construct your poem. Go for it. 13. Lesson 4C: Editing: Alright, How did you go? Maybe you have the makings of a poem there for yourself, something that you're beginning to be happy with. Your board it onto your computer and begin to work it out this construction phase. Now that we've constructed it out, now we want to look at it with a critical eye. We want to take it and we want to start developing embellishing pots and we want to stop taking stuff away. We want to add to certain parts, and we want to take other things away. These actually is my favorite part of the process. It's really weird because it used to be my most hated potluck. I hated doing drafts and editing and all that kind of stuff. But actually what I've come to realize over the years is my riding becomes hates better when I do them. In fact, what I would say, I like this kind of a myth. What you would think is the better writer you are, the less drafts you would need. I want to say that it's the opposite. The better writer you are, the more drafts you're going to need, the more that you work at something and change it and change this and change that part and change that part. What are you looking for as you change, as you look over your piece now, how you're going to change it. I wanted to say a few different things. First thing I want to talk about what you can embellish kinda within it. And this is the idea of this, like I said, for some of you as you're writing, it might be in the form of lack the dog cross the road. What I want you to see is if you can take some of your writing, delve more into it. Which parts feel a bit? Maybe, maybe like you could like they're drawing you in a bit. They might feel a little bit empty. I'll actually could add some more. I want you to add some more to style it before we even started taking lots away. I want you to add some more. It's a difference between I've written something here. Let's difference between he left his house and walk to school. That's how it might mean in your first draft, maybe you would have written something like that. Now I could take that and develop it. I can say this instead. The stepping stones across these front God and will always an obstacle pack on back. He just wanted to get out of there, leave home or whatever you'd want to call this place anyways, we stumbled more than walked to school. He'd be beaten, but free when he walked through the school gate. All of that from he left his house and walked to school. I wonder what you could develop more in your own writing using some of what we've been talking about. How could you bring some stuff out? Use your five senses a bit more, give it a bit more specificity. So have a look now pause at to start with, just have a look at what you could develop a little bit more within your pace, spend a few minutes doing that. Now the key part of editing that we're coming to, the key part of this construction phase of editing. I've kind of set it out for you. A bunch of things that you can look at. Let me put it up on the screen here. As, as construct we have. First one is cliche. The sea of construct is cliche. Look for those things within your writing that might be cliche. Things that you've heard before. See if you can change them, delve into them or change them to something else. A phrase that you've just often heard before. Anything that seems too familiar, challenge yourself to change that, to break out of that cliche changed the sword is the pen is sold to the pen is a story and say what happens. Work on cliche change cliches, omit. What do you need to omit out of your work? In other words, how can you, what do you need to take out to make your work better? We often, often when I when I was at school, my teachers would always say u2. You're too verbose. You need to keep it simple. Keep it simple. And I would say it, I would say to you take off at least 10%. I want you to go and do that now, at least 10% if you spend some time developing and embellishing stuff now I want you to strip it back. I want you to cut stuff out, cut stuff that, that's not working. You can go through just these last few that I construct and how to edit. And then I want you to spend some time editing, doing all of this together. You're gonna hit pause and do it, do it in a second. Narrative is the next one. Is there a strong narrative flow to your work? Does it have a beginning, a middle, and an end, save a dollar? Or is it just confusing? That's linked to structure, which is the next one. Is there a strong structure we've been talking about the hook structure, hook palm. Hopefully that's given you enough structure but have a look. Does it seem like does it seem like some things are too random within it and it's one that is things that are random and duct fit. What can you take out That's a little too random to make sure that the structure is working well t that we just dumped over his thread. Is there a common thread? What's the common thread that is running through your pace? Make sure there's something that from the beginning to the end is something we're still talking about. That same thread. That has woven it away in perhaps it's that image like the, like the elephant at the circus all lack the fence. They were my two threads that went through all of that. Perhaps it's an image that runs through at all or a thought or a way of phrasing things, a common thread that goes through it or is there anything that's unclear? You for unclear. Anything that's unclear in your word as you read through. Maybe this is the point also once you've done this one editing, this is also the point where you could give it to someone else. You can ask them to have a look and if they say, I didn't get what's happening here, that'll also help you see what unclear in your work. Then to give that unclear stuff, give it some clarity, simplify it. What are you trying to say? What is what would someone whose hearing it? What would that here? What are you trying to say? Focusing on your lastly, focusing on your theme. Is your fame. Fame obvious all the way through. Not too obvious, like you're just preaching at people. But is there a common theme? Have you stuck to theme or have you just going off? And what do we say? Chasing rabbits down random holes here, there and everywhere. I wanted you to see there's a bunch of things that are cliche emit narrative structure, Thread, random, unclear clarity thing I want you to go through. I don't want you to do this editing draft now, taking things at cutting it down, simplifying your language, taking out cliches are meeting what's unclear, all that kind of stuff that we've just said. You spend some time doing that now see if you can come to a final draft of this thing that you've been creating. Go do that. He pulls and go do that. There we have perhaps now maybe I don't know if you're happy with your pace now. Perhaps you're still not happy and that is so okay as well. I often get to this point. I'm like, It still is not working. What I often do then is I'll leave it I'll leave it for a week or two or a month, sometimes even a year on leave it. I'll come back to it later and look at it with a fresh set of eyes. So if you're still like, oh, this is crap, which many of you will be because that's because that's just what you tell yourself, which is just silly. I'm sure there's some really wonderful poems in. Next thing is going to be inviting people into the experience in alpine. We'll get to that in a second in our next lesson. But for now, I want you to look at your pace, even if you feel like it's crap. I want you to be proud of what you've done, even if you feel like it's crap, that's crap just because you think it is. Be proud that you have gone all the way so far from having nothing all the way through to having something of a finished poem. How wonderful listener? Next lesson we're gonna look at inviting people into the experience of good work. Everybody. 14. Lesson 5A: The Invitation: Friends, we are up to the final lesson together. Well, that rotting performance poetry workshop. Hopefully this has been a wonderful time for you. I've really enjoyed doing these videos. I hope you are learning lots. I want to finish today. We're gonna be talking about the invitation. We've done our inspiration, creation, construction, and now we're gonna focus in on the invitation. The invitation is all about maybe willing to invite other people into the experience of my poll. And I'll talk a lot more about that in a sec. But I thought to start with, to get us back thinking about inviting people in his all about performance. It's all about how can I best express this poem? Because, I mean, you could run the best poem in the entire world and then get up to share. Everyone falls asleep within ten seconds. So you guys, it was the best poem in the entire world. So I want us to be thinking about how could I give people an experience of my poetry? You guys, at the very start, you did a performance poetry toolbox to riding and performance as I was doing my poem, you could have a look back at that. You could do a bit of a new one now and it'll be having a think, I'm going to perform one more poem for you now to finish off, I want to be having a think, what do I do? Perform actively to invite you into this poem. It's a poem called cartography, which is about map making. See I want sort of girl empty herself out upon a napkin. Increment t is in the paper where she screwed it up and throw it in the beam than walked away. I couldn't help myself. I reached in my hand and took out her crumbled story and I laid it gently out upon the table. Say paper is a precious thing. It is willing, it takes in upon itself are very wounds, are very wishes are splotch and splat on a lot of ink on paper spilled lyrics like spilt milk, scope rhythms, rhyme, she spoke this time, so I went over the words, studied the colon towards this is crumpled map in sorrow. Poetry spilt as mountain on parchment. A deep lake and the cut-through river valley with a lonely wonder, a forest to dock. Got it only by the map of ink spilled on napkin. I found myself walking the edges of her life. You see cartography. It is built on the premise that reality can be modeled. The stretch of a landscape laid flat out on the paper for we sailors and our ships, our craft and the ocean is our imagination. And the wind that fills our sales is something that we know but can barely even name yet. It drives us forward. Guile the Borodin, inside us, every word is an island, every story is a mountain. Every time I speak, I am drawing this world for you. I'm setting the sale and navigation. We are silenced. We are the map makers tracing lines of a land that others cannot see the uncharted, the unresolved. Be dragons. Maybe shadow. There'll be not men, they'd be wonders and they'd be more beauty than you could ever contained in this map. This writing, the direction, the way through. A writer and a cartographer. Wanted the same. Succumb sale with me, friends. Be curious with me, wonder with me, see artistry where others only see oddly a new pickup, the parchment that crumpled map of sorrow thrown into the waste, spin up somebody else's life. You see it for what it is. It is a map to guide your way home. And then you remember to open yourself up to the world. Every part of you let them read you lack a map. Let them see that you let them check, you let them travel, you let them become who they are through your stories CPU. You want that map to guide their way home. Let us take, let us say altogether a name. All those things that have become us. There we go. I wonder what you heard in that poll you saw in that poem, that poem called cartography is about what writing is to me. A bunch of stuff that we've talked about in this series that writing poetry is about looking inside, being like a mapmaker of our insides, being able to name those things that we find hard to name. That's what that poem was all about. But how did I perform it to you? Spend some time now and write some things down that worksheet, performativity. What did I do within that poem? 15. Lesson 5B: Performance: You see there's a few different ways that we invite people into the experience of how poetry and the reason that I phrase it, frame it like that, that I phrase it like that often we, we say within kind of performance poetry world we say this, Don't tell me your palm. Show me. Don't tell me. Show me your palm. I just want to hear it. I want to see it. I would say don't just tell me what I want to do is I want to give people an experience of my poem. I want to invite them into the experience so that I feel what I feel as I do it. And there's a number of ways that I invite people into that. There's a number of different ways that I invite people who die. I don't want to go through these with you now, are you ready to perform? Ready to perform. Let's start with the e here, the a and the I. The a and the I are embodiment and authenticity. When I write a poem and I get up and perform it, I want to bring my whole self to it. I want to give them a whole self-taught, which means I need to not care about what other people are thinking about me. Do you know about most highlighted by mice? The thing that I was scared of the most when I was at high school, when I was junior high, you'll rank speaking out in front of people. I'm sure there's a bunch of you sitting there going. Yeah, that's me. I was petrified by its SAR petrified, I would check a CK. I pretend to be sick at home so that I wouldn't have to go in and do a speech at school. Absolutely. I totally hated it. It was something that changed for me. As I grew up a little bit. Alda, a friend invited me along to to speak at a youth group events. I grew up in church world and our wet along and he wanted me to speak and I really wanted I didn't want to share my story at all. I would have maybe about 16 or something, 15 or 16. And I got the courage up. I'm gonna do it, I can do it. I got up petrified. I shared my story and there was this one guy sitting at the back and he came up to me afterwards and he said it was like you were speaking to me like I never knew anyone who had a similar story to my own. Thank you so much. I just I don't feel so alone anymore. Lot from something I said someone's life could be he didn't have to feel so alone anymore. It was like this thing set off on me. I was like, I have to challenge this fee in me to stop me from speaking out in front of people. I want to be able to change people's lives like that. What I did, what I can name now, what are my thoughts were what I realized I couldn't have made it back then. But now what I would say is this. I realized that what I have to say is more important than the fear that stops me from saying it. What I have to say is more important than the fear that stops me to say it. And I would say the same to you, my friends. What you have to say is more important than the fear that stops you from saying. Authenticity is about choosing to be your whole vulnerable self, giving your whole self to this, no matter what other people might be thinking, it's about owning who you are, not getting up on stage. Sometimes it feels like metaphorically, of course, that unlike stripped naked on stage because I'm sharing, I'm bearing my soul to people. I'm holding myself out saying, look at this is May. But I choose to do it because authenticity breeds beautiful things in people's lives. Authenticity breeds life in people. When someone, when one person, he's their own story, someone courageously telling their story and I hear their own story in it. That person can be set free. So that's why we choose to do it. Be as, what I would say is be as authentic as you can. They don't come up on stage or don't invite people into a performance space and try to be like a big lab redhead at the front of the studies like I'm here. You just be, you bring different things that we're gonna talk about in a second tool, but you be, you own who you are, who you are, your voice and your story matters. And we want to hear that you be authentically you in that place. In this performance place, performance spanked. Embodiment is as you do that, be true to who you are and be true to who the poem is, what the poem is about. The heart of the poem. Remember why you wrote it is something we often yell out when people added performance poetry event. We do all these weird things like clicking, snapping or clicking people as they get up and perform here a line that we lack at one of the things that we also yell at before someone starts a poem is, remember why you wrote it. I don't want to, What I would say to you is what that's about is tapping into the authentic reason of why you wrote the poem. If it's an angry poem, then you get angry up on stage. If it's a poem that is inspirational than you get in, not in an overt dramatic way like I just did them, but you get what I mean by authentic tool. I know I'll never forget a year ten March, a kid and an old boys private school who gets up, shares about his mom's mental illness. And he just broke down weeping, composed himself. He kept on going with the poem in teas, teas or streaming down his face as he does this poem, they finishes the poem, there's just silence, everyone is just captivated. It's one of those sacred moments just because he's willing to be authentic and to embody his poem. Not in an over dramatic way like I said, but in a real wide tap in to those real emotions of why you wrote it in the first place. What was it That's been stirring up in you that caused you to write this poem. Embodiment is about owning that, about owning the tone of your poem. Authenticity and embodiment. Choosing the step over that wall of fear and give your whole self to the performance of this pace that any, the only poems that I ever can remember, uh, when I've seen someone do that, That's what sticks in our Brian when we see someone authentically honestly connect with themselves and with the Pace, authenticity and embodiment soap up to the top on our IU ready to perform our rhythm. Whenever I share a poem, a poem has rhythm within it. Poem has rhythm within it. In fact, any beginning to speak to you now, and I'm just talking to you as normal, but all I need to do is start to begin to emphasize certain syllables. As I emphasized syllables, my speech now sounds like kits, a rhythm. Rhythm comes all by emphasize and syllables emphasize and still a book. That's our rhythm means. It's when we pick up on certain syllables, we emphasize those and we start to speak with a lilt, with a rhythm. Every poem has a rhythm within your poem that you've written has a rhythm within it. In fact, I want you to go and find that rhythm. Perhaps it's got multiple rhythms and some pauses. And you might drop out of one thing in coming to another. You might speak normally for a bit. You might tap into a rhythm dropping the, something else. What I'd love you to do now is to sit with your part. And the only way, the only way to develop this is by doing it out loud. I don't know. That might be weird. You might be seeing at home in your bedroom and your people are down there, just go tell him I'm about to do something loud to myself or just Spirit to yourself in your room, but you need to own, it needs to come out of your vocal cords for you to find the rhythm. I want you to press pause in a second. I want you to go over your poem. I'm talking like 510 times. The amount of times I do have my poems is ridiculous. You just go over it again and again and again. Tapping into MATLAB, tapping into the rhythm within your poem. The rhythm within your pulp. Find that rhythm. Pause and do that. 16. Lesson 5C: Dynamics: We've got two more points in. Are you ready to perform? You are ready. The D and the I is all about dynamics, the dynamics of your palm or you would have noticed, hopefully you wrote in that performance toolbox that I brought different what I call dynamics. That's dynamics exchanges within my column, changes in pace, changes in volume, changes in tone, changes in intensity of my delivery. What I've tried to do if I was just doing one monotone boring poem, I would just write it as one strike line. What I'm trying to do is type people on a journey. I'll bring people down and then we'll have a pause. I'll bring people down the spine on the poles again and then I'll bring it up and I'll bring it out, but I'll bring it up to a peak at the top. Type, what's the journey that you're going to type people on with your palm is their points of peak of climax? Or do you want to drop it down slow? What kind of poem is that? How you're going to, you're going to bring the dynamics to the Pol, one of the easy ways and this is what will get you to do now, one of the great ways of doing this is to start to mock up your page. Mock up your page. And what this means is that as something is building on my page, I'll start having, I'll put it in bold, then I'll get baller and bigger font. And then my peak will be an even bigger font and bold and black. Now, I'm beginning to build up and build up. And now I'm going to build off with this slide and then I drop it back down. Maybe you want to underline way, you're going to speak really slow and you're going to come right in and look people in the eye and say something important. You might do a squiggly line underneath where you're gonna speak really fast way of tapping into the rhythm that speaks fast. And so you're gonna speak like this. Mock up your page, have a symbol that's for pausing things to remind you you have you could color-code it if it's on the computer, color-coded it, or highlight it if it's on a bit of piper still. In terms of time that it's gonna be a joyful time here I'm gonna be inspirations and drop it down and be serious. Now, bring the different dynamics to your pace again, you'll have to go over it out loud to find a how do you want to bring it up and when do you want to drop it down? So I want you to do that now in a pause. And I want you to go and again, you're going to need to do it out loud because I want you to get loud in the parts you want to get. You're gonna get Laughing, bringing the dynamics into the poem, and mark up your page as you do. So again, I want you to go over it like five times working on Dynamics now poles go for it. We're up to our final I, I in this is intentionality. Intentionality. This is all about you being intentional about your actions. Say most of the time when we start doing poetry, we come up and wherever IT nervous. So we've got our paper and what we don't realize we're doing this, we'd kind of dance out the front because we're so nervous. Instead, I want you to come up and what I always try to do is come up with a stamp and I price myself, I'll put my feet in the ground. This is my spot. And if I'm gonna move from this spot, I only do it when I'm going to be intentional about doing it, rather than just pacing around, plant myself. And from here I'll be in tension. If I want to move out to my audience, I intentionally do so. And also what I'm doing with my hands and my actions. You would notice that in a bunch of my poetry I have different actions. I have things, things that I do in that elephant poem or the one that I just did that the laying of the map at the mountain, the valley, the cut through River. I have small actions that I bring to increase the effectiveness of the poem. I want to encourage you, this is something you can do as well. Stan, be intentional about sharing your paints and maybe I don't know what you're gonna do now. Maybe you could finish your poem. Maybe you could do your poem, record it as a video, recorded as a video that you can send to your classmates. However, your teacher might be doing an assessment part of this or whatever it might be. Or you could share with your family, however, you are going to perform a be intentional. So he's the activity that you can do for this. I want you to grab one of the lines of your poem. As you grab that, maybe it's your hook, maybe work on your hook. I want you to go away. If you are going to bring some intentional actions to this line, what would they be? I stand up, wha, wha you can press pause in a second and go over that line. Almost do it to the point of being two over dramatic and then you bring it down, bring it back to simplify. But to start with, go like word-by-word, what action would I give to that word? What action would I give to that? Well, what, actually what I give to that word in my hook or, or just a really good line within your poem. Say, pause it and bring some intentional actions to your poll. Go for it. 17. Lesson 5D: Conclusion: There we have it. You hopefully now are ready to perform and you're ready to invite people in to the experience of your poem. Again, I don't know how you want to do this, but perhaps you could film it. You could share it with family, whatever this might look like online. Feel free to send them to me to go to my website, Joel macquarie.com. But on my website and from there you'll be able to find my email and send it to me. Because I'd love to see them. I'd love to see what you've been working on and how you've developed it, put it up, He's a challenge. It put it up on YouTube and see what people think. Get it out there. Our words, these words that we have, remember they can change the world. That can change people's lives. One person might not feel so lonely because you share your poem with them. I remember two boys from a school a few years ago who recorded their poem about, about women, about how women are treated in our society. To the ten boys, they got up, they wrote it with me. They perform how they perform it. And then in their media class, they then, they bought some music to it and they filmed it together. They put it up on YouTube. And this thing is maintained by thousands of people. Now, just these two kids, poetry. You might be sitting there going, Oh, don't want to even like get that Joel Love's poetry and I've done this palpitating go, what do I do with it now? Share it. That's what you do with it. One of the things that I always say to every workshop I do is this, the scribbling in your journals? Other words, the world needs to hear. We need to hear what you have to say your story. It matters. You'll story matters so you open up your mouth and speak and even if you're sitting, Daniel, I just stuck a 12-year-old kid. What's this going to do? Is this guy, he's named Soli Raphael. He's a Sydney Sina. He'd be like 14 or something now but he was like 12. I think it was a few years ago. Maybe it's 15 and I was like 12 when he got up and he wrote a poem, right? And they perform it at the hate, what we call the Australian National Poetry Slam Championships, which is a national poetry performance poetry competition. You will find that these hate just in a suburban Sydney, just a 12-year-old kids from school, just since that brought to call, gets it out performed in his hate and he wins the hate. Allowed him to go to the state file. We went to the stepfather. He performed his poem. So it could go to the National Final at the Sydney Opera House. He gets out these 12-year-old key. It gets up and he performs his poem, and he wins it. He became the National Australia National Poetry Slam Champion. Because of that, a few months later was the opening way. It was when we had the Commonwealth Games here in Australia. He got up, he got to share his poem at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games to however many people in the world watched that. How many millions of people all over the world who watch this opening ceremony? It was a 12-year-old kid, just like some of you sitting out there going. I could do something with these Paul. Maybe, maybe you could please remember everything that we've talked about. Poetry is something never, never that should just stay in school is something you have to do. Poetry might actually save your life when you're going through something hard. When you're struggling, when you when there's a whole lot of self-doubt or you just wrestling with something, pull out a pen. Sorry, I'm gonna do some flow of conscious writing. I feel you just write about it. And I promise you it's like letting some of that air out of that balloon like we talked about a few lessons ago. Poetry. One, it can save you a lot to, it can change the world around us. Select Raphael, 12-year-old, standing in front of millions of people, getting to share his story, his words, three poetry, poetry and all these boring nerdy thing you have to do in school poetry is in some of the coolest stuff we have an LL, creativity, storytelling, rotting all these things that we love in our world, songs at a hip-hop and rap and movies and all these things computed items. People who choose to say, screw the line that this is just boring nerdy stuff you have to do in school. I'm gonna write a story, I'm gonna work out the best way to communicate that. Friends, this is my challenge to you may poetry becomes something may have writing creativity, fiction writing storytelling becomes something that changes your life and changes the lives of those around you invite people into the poems that you create. It has been so wonderful and I hope that you have enjoyed this five-part series together. Please do check out my website, Joel macquarie.com. I run other online courses and things like that all the time. Send me a message, let me know what's happening. Find me on Instagram, jawline Mikado poet. Connect to me there however you want to. Keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on rocking.