This past April, I was invited to give a poetry presentation at Amy Safarik’s gifted grade 12 class at the University Transition Program through the Poet in Class program with Poetry in Voice.
During my visit, I talked about different forms of poetry, read some poems, and showed some of my poetry videos and an erasure poem and discussed the process for the different approaches. The class also participated in some in-class writing exercises.
In June, students who had made poetry videos for their class assignments were encouraged by their teacher to contact me to share their videos. UTP student Pratyaksha Awasthi wrote an evocative poem, “a day at the park,” and turned it into the terrific poetry video below. She wrote, “I was really inspired by your poetry videos, especially the one titled “Omelet.” The images and the words together created a wonderful experience! Recently, we had a poetry project in school, for which I tried to make a video in a similar style, and I was hoping to share it with you!” I am certain viewers will find the animated drawings and sound design as lovely and engaging as I did.
Two other students from the class, Linden Shi and Amanda Young, undertook the creation of an amazing math-themed poetry video. I was impressed by the unfolding of the many images, the pacing, and expressive joint narration.
Linden told me about their extensive creative process in an email: “Inspired by your poetry videos, we also decided to try creating one. It was based on a poem we had written together, titled “Listen to What I’m Seong” (Richard Seong being the person who writes the math textbooks we use at school). Our poem playfully explores our relationship with math–a subject we’re both passionate about–and how it has changed over the course of our lives, filled with our own musings and references that hopefully make it relatable to our peers. We wrote the poem with the idea of creating a video, and thus took great care to ensure that each section was of the proper length for a < 2 minute video. We also added bits and pieces of ideas for the visual components as we wrote. The video itself was animated digitally in Procreate, and included a few screen recordings as well. It took a lot of effort and a very long time to brainstorm animation ideas for the entire poem, create them, and stitch them together in a video editing software, but we think it was well worth it!” Viewers will agree that it was definitely well-worth it!
Teacher Amy Safarik told me about other students’ poetry projects. One group acted out their poems, and another student used AI to generate artwork. Others made handmade chapbooks. She told me, “I am very fortunate to work with highly gifted learners. With creative inspiration and support, they are capable of so much.” What a talented class!