Ideas for Readings, Workshops,
and Presentations
 
Readings, workshops, and presentations for college and high school students; community groups; book clubs; bookstores; libraries; groups (of any size) interested in poetry, video, teaching language arts. If interested, contact me and together we can design a program or presentation. 1. A Poetry Reading Poems from recent collections, old poems, new poems, including poems from ongoing collaborations with landscape artist Stephen Henning from Evansville, Minnesota, and ELCA pastor Elaine Hewes from Sedgwick, Maine.... 2. Poems about Place: Writing about the rural area where I live 3. Poems about Family –– Where To Draw the Line? 4. Poems that Pay Attention to the Ordinary Some of my poems, as well as poems by Pablo Neruda, Anne Porter, Ted Kooser, Irina Ratushinskaya, and others 5. Where I’m From: Writing Poems with 4th, 5th, and 6th Graders 6. Video and Poetry: What Happens When They Meet? (A Screening of Video Poems) A video poem combines video and poetry into a powerful and magical art form. The purpose of the presentation is to introduce the audience to this new art form and the media literacy skills associated with it. We’ll see how these projects integrate, among other things, technology; literature; writing; music and sound; visual images; color; creative thought; organization; cooperative planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. We will watch and discuss lots of examples by video poets of all ages to explore the wide range of possibilities. Video poems for this screening will be selected from: •“The United States of Poetry” •The National Poetry Association video poetry collection •”Poetry Spots,” a collection of video poems broadcast on WNYC in New York •productions by students at Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School and the Minnesota Institute for Talented Youth •productions by George Aguilar, a multi-media artist from San Francisco 7. How To Get Started We’ll talk about what a video poem is and how to make one. Together, we’ll model the pre-production stages of creating a video poem, starting with reading the poem, brainstorming its sound and visual transformation, and then watch and discuss a production based on that poem. 8. A Video Poetry Collaboration For the past 15 years, media artist Mike Hazard (from St. Paul, MN) and I have been collaborating with students to make video poems. This presentation will focus on the collaboration. During ten video poetry residencies at Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School in Long Prairie, Minnesota, ten video poems were made based on my prose poems. We’ll watch and discuss a mix of these works. 9. Creating Connections I: Writing Session Together we will do a writing exercise that focuses on juxtaposing images that were never intended to be juxtaposed and seeing what happens. This is an interesting exercise in editing and the use of montage in film and video. During this session we can also talk about how to “read the screen.” To do this, we’ll consider the “four dimensions” of poetry and then discuss how they can be applied to “reading” film and video. 10. Creating Connections II: More than a Dozen Ideas for Writing This presentation is full of ideas for writing that is inspired by the connections that are created by putting together still images, works of art, music, all kinds of unexpected prompts. We can talk about writing about photographs. We can also talk about the importance of paying attention to seemingly simple, ordinary objects, using, as examples, writing by Irina Ratushinskaya, Annie Dillard, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Natalie Goldberg, Bill Meissner, and Scott Russell Sanders. During the session, we can focus on one or more than one of these ideas. We can write. 11. The Short, Short, Very Short Story Actually, this presentation could be could be an extension of #5. We’ll discuss the short prose form, quick fiction, sudden fiction, flash fiction, the paragraph, the sentence, the prose poem...even try some writing. To show what students have done with some of these suggestions, examples from a collection of short short prose pieces written by LPGE High School students will be read. 12. My Life as a Teacher and Writer How, at the age of 28, I decided to take a one-week summer workshop designed for teachers “afraid of poetry.” How, during that week, to my surprise, I discovered that I need to write. How, to my surprise, my first poems were published. How the influence of a few people at critical times in my life provided the encouragement to keep writing. How I tried to combine teaching and writing. How an undisciplined writer works. 13. A Reading with Video Poems In January 2003, What Calls Us, a chapbook of my poems, was published by Dacotah Territory Press in Moorhead, MN. In November 2003, Broken Lines, a collection of prose poems, was published by Juniper Press in St. Paul. Seventeen of these poems have been used for video poems––ten during the Mike Hazard video poetry residencies at Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School; two by George Aguilar, a multi-media artist from San Francisco; and five that I have made. This presentation will include a reading of selections from these books, from some new work, and also a showing of some of the video poems. Reading on the Mississippi River Stage at the Minnesota State Fair