My Friends & Other Animals

I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches to my first poetry collection, My Friends and other Animals. I wanted to explore and document how ICT might stimulate the creative process and how it might be used to enhance the performance aspect of poetry. Most importantly I wanted to practise what I regularly preach about the role of ICT and educators in the creative process.

For me, the reading of a poem does not represent the totality of a poetic experience. I want to listen to poetry read aloud and I want to have a go a reading it myself. I want to give listeners an insight into why and how I wrote a poem and offer an open invitation for them to cook up their own poetic creation. I want dialogue and two-way flows of creativity and inspiration.

I have personally found that ICT offers wonderful intrinsic motivation to stimulate the senses, to whet the creative appetite and to have a go at writing, publishing, performing, collaborating and communicating with an audience. It is in this spirit that I will launch my collection in the next fortnight. It might not be brilliant poetry and the audience might be small but I’m having a fun time putting it together. It is my poetry.

Hopefully, it is a process that can be replicated in schools, making the technology fade magically into the background, and allowing the enjoyment of writing to take centre stage. I’ll write more about that later – I don’t want to steal my own thunder

Anyway to one of the poems – My Mate Chris – with accompanying audio.

My mate Chris

My mate Chris
performs amazing feats
of dangerous dexterity
and perilous parkour.
He vaults,
somersaults through his spiderman-tastic existence,
enjoying near-celebrity status at the local casualty department.

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