A long time ago in a theatre far, far away… four grades of PLP went to watch Star Wars, the Rise of Skywalker. As these movies tend to go, it was an action-packed adventure of heroes, villains, and space magic, but just like the dark side of the force, the overall perspectives on it were quite mixed. Some people loved the characters, others hated the locations. Some liked the connections to real-world issues, and others were just flat out indifferent. No matter what opinions we held however, all of us made sure that they were shared. The entire car ride back all we did was talk and talk and talk, as if this movie was the center of the universe. And it is just a movie! However, because we had developed our own strong opinions, all of the sudden it was much more than that.

This event has helped me realize that sharing perspectives is a key part of human nature. We must share ours with others and in turn hear theirs in order to reach a common ground and develop strong relationships. Unfortunately, like a car packed with kids talking over each other about their favourite Star Wars moment, we aren’t always the best at getting these perspectives across. Sometimes they don’t interest others, and other times they contradict their opinions, but whatever the reasons may be getting someone else to understand your worldview is no easy task. An example of this which we have recently been studying is with various demographics living in the 1950’s. Women, non-conformists, intellectuals, and many other minorities constantly found their perspectives being pushed aside by society. Yet, some of them despite all the obstacles found a way to be heard. How? Through beat poetry.

Now I hope at this point you are confused as where this is going, because I sure was when I heard what our PLP winter exhibition unit was going to be for this year. In order to reflect on methods of sharing our perspectives, our class was tasked with researching the Beat Movement of the 1950’s and how poets did just this through their poetry, and then with using the aesthetic of Star Wars to create an engaging exhibition space. At first it sounded crazy, but looking back on it now I can’t believe how fun it was to answer our driving question of:

Answering a driving question is never just about knowing the answer, it’s about showing it. For this unit, we got the opportunity to present our key knowledge in three milestones:

Our Poetry Collections

What fun would researching crazy poets be if we didn’t get the chance to be crazy poets ourselves? In order to demonstrate everything we had learned about literary devices, poetry structure, and sharing our perspectives throughout the unit, we were tasked with creating our own collection of poetry. This all began with tapping into our own perspectives and writing styles with daily stream of consciousness writing exercises, which were followed up with learning proper literary devices. We then explored these devices and poetry structure through analyzing poems by famous beatniks such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and started noticing things such as tone, mood, and line organization techniques. Once we had a sufficient bank of knowledge, it was time to take a crack at writing our own poetry, which resulted in the book above.

Our Presentations of Poetry

One of the things that made this exhibition so fun was that we didn’t have to worry about manning a booth; our product was presenting our poetry! To get a sense of what this would entail, we watched a number of videos of famous poets, ranging from the originals such as Allen Ginsberg to modern artists such as Shane Koyczan and broke down what it was that made them unique. Through these investigations, we learned the importance of memorization, body language, projection, enunciation, and many more presentation aspects in bringing a text to life, and then got a chance to practice them ourselves at a dress rehearsal. After receiving some feedback, including to hold my poetry notes farther away and to be aware of the time limit, I practiced on my own time and quickly found myself ready for the big night.

Our Cantina Contributions

If you watched the video, you will notice that it’s not just the poetry making this exhibition night stand out. Every inch of our school’s weight room had been transformed into the Star Wars Cantina, complete with windows, a bar, themed lighting, posters, and much much more. It truly took the room to the next level, but it was no easy task to create. Every member of our class was constantly kept busy during this unit, for when when we weren’t writing our poetry we were working on our cantina contributions. When I first heard we were going to get another crack at recreating the grand cinematic universe of Star Wars, I looked for ideas equally as big. I wanted to make animatronics, and a TV station, and a podcast, and…a whole lot of other things that I had no time to do. Then, remembering my goal from last year’s tPols of doing onlythe work needed for the required result,I decided to solely focus on creating posters. By doing this, not only did I have a lot less work, but I also found myself connecting a lot more to our driving question as through these posters I could reflect 1950’s perspectives.

 

 

To kick this project off, we began by scratching the surface of what the Beat Movement was. For those who are unaware, the Beat Generation was a group of people who emerged to oppose the societal norms and challenges of 1950’s society. According to acclaimed poet Allen Ginsberg, this group lived with a “first thought, best thought” (Ginsberg) mindset and aimed to stay as uncensored as possible. They were misfits; people who could not fit into the prevailing norms of “employee” or “house wife”. They believed that the new world’s values in consumerism, conformist suburban life, and beliefs in life needing to being perfect were flawed, and had weakened society, especially in America. They believed in freedom, change, truth, and above all in sharing this with the masses, and found a great outlet to do so to be poetry. The first taste of this topic we got came from the video below.

Although the fights of the Beat Generation have long since passed today, new topics are always on the rise for opposition. One that is commonly discussed right now is the education system, with many students feeling that it’s values on memorization and factual knowledge is not preparing them for a society that now values innovation and creativity. We saw an example of this with the video below:

I don’t fully support in the “revolutionize education” philosophy, nor some of the causes that the beat poets

fought for, but I somehow found myself rooting for them anyways as I watched these videos. I was connecting with the messages, seeing their worldviews, and entertained all at the same time, and this was because they reflected their perspectives through poetry. There was something about the creative, strange, and simultaneously beautiful rhythm of their speaking which broke pass the barriers I usually hold towards opposing perspectives. It was then I first saw how powerful of a tool poetry could be.

With this newfound appreciation for the medium, our class was tasked with our first assignment; writing a spoken word poetry piece:

Other than having the criteria of needing to speak our poem out loud, we were pretty much given free rein to write about whatever we wanted. This proved to be a challenge for me, as so many ideas came rushing to my head. To solve this, I once again reflected on my goal of doing only doing the criteria, and decided to do this by focusing my poem around the driving theme of perspectives. This quickly led me to find the topic of ageism, which is something I both have a strong perspective on and can show another’s perspective on easily as I have spoken about it with many other people. Continuing on the theme of brevity, I decided to keep my poem focused around one scene, and soon had the poem The Richest Man completed (page 3 of my poetry book)

Once this poem was completed, I got to work on recording myself speaking it. I assumed this would be the easiest part of this task, with the recording being limited to around a minute and all, but this ended up being far from the truth. After watching some more examples of spoken word poetry, I realized that presenting a work like this requires deliberate speed control, tone, projection, and many other devices. It definitely took a couple of tries to get these things right, but I’m glad that I put this effort in as I started to develop the key poetry presentation skills which would be critical later in the unit. I am also quite proud of this poem overall, as I managed to create something that is engaging but also brief.

We started this unit by skimming the surface, but now it was time to dive deep and branch off into the key knowledge. This took the form of three general topics, and the first one was life in the 1950’s. Our exploration of this time took off by being introduced to a concept perfectly described by CBC.ca; “family life had been put on hold during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Now Canadians wanted to settle down and enjoy the comforts of life.” We quickly came to see that the perspective of the average 1950’s family was that it was now time to live life to the fullest, with the more money, material goods, cars, houses, and children, the better. A perfect example of this mindset can be demonstrated in the show Leave it to Beaver, which we watched in class:

The second topic we began to explore in more depth was how to write poetry. Although with intuition we were able to get us started with this, it was clear we needed an understanding of literary devices, poetry structure, and a number of other things to bring our work to the next level. To develop this, we started off by exploring a new type of poetry every couple of days, including prose, free verse, confessional, and haiku. A couple of ways that we did this was through looking into examples written by professional poets, practicing with them during our stream of consciousness sessions, and discussing them in class. What I found the most helpful however was learning about the various literary devices used in these poetry forms. These include:

After days of working with all of these, I noticed my stream of consciousness poetry getting better and better. Unfortunately, I also noticed it getting longer and longer, and I consistently went over class time writing them. I was afraid to cut them back as I feared they would then not meet the criteria, but this turned out to be pointless as I later found out these poems were just for personal practice. I then realized that all that time could have been saved if I had just clarified what the expectations are, and am going to work to do this more in the future.

Now at this point you might be wondering why all of this matters. After all, who cares if you can make words sound pretty with literary devices? How does this help one explain their perspectives? We were given an answer to this question with the third branch of this research period; the Beat Generation.

It was quite fascinating to learn all about the individuals, locations, and stories of this group of people, but what really stood out to me here was how uniquely they fit in with the rest of society. Everything about their worldview clashed with the societal norms and “civil decencies” like gender, religious, and sexuality norms of the time, and yet some how they were listened to. Why? Because they talked through poetry.

When I came to this realization, I felt all of these threads connect and I had an answer to the driving question. How we can use poetry to reflect our perspectives, is by using it to take the ugly, the complicated, the boring, and make it interesting and engaging so people will want to listen. Take Allen Ginsberg and his poem A Supermarket in California for an example:

Through his use of literary devices like Allusion and imagery, he makes the reader think, question, and become interested in whatever he has to say, no matter how bleak or negative. Or take Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles:

Here, a rather boring scene of a father showing a kid how an axe is made uses metaphor and simile to display a powerful meaning. Even if we look at poets who may not be part of the beat movement, we can see that their messages are heightened through their medium of sharing them. Take Shane Koyczan and his breakthrough poem To This Day for an example…

What he has to say is important, but it’s true power comes from the fact that poetry turns this message not into something that we are told, but something that we are shown.

Bio of A Beat

Now at this point, I had a pretty good understanding of how poetry can be a good medium to express my perspectives through, but the problem was I didn’t know exactly what perspectives I would be expressing. I wasn’t sure of the things in my life that I had a meaningful perspective on, and was finding trouble drawing inspiration. Luckily, our second major assignment, Bio of a Beat, helped guide me in the right direction:

For this task, we were asked to put together a media piece that explained the life of and answered questions about a beat poet or author. The person I chose to do was Joyce Johnson, the first female beat author and former girlfriend of Jack Kerouac, and as I was inspired by her work as an author I decided that my product was going to be a book (made in the app Book Creator). I am quite proud at how it turned out as I was able to stick to a cohesive story and still get all the facts across, and also didn’t go overboard with aesthetic. I’m also proud of how well my research went, and feel that I have developed a new skill in terms of it, which is being able to apply the Launch Cycle. What I mean by this is typically, I’ll have some prior knowledge before starting a research project, which allows me to make an outline and just fill in the blanks. For this one however I had to start from square one, so I decided to try the tried and true Blue Sky approach and it worked wonders.

I first started out by simply reading about her, recording nothing but considering everything. Then, I went back and recorded the notes that seemed useful and filled in the blanks by asking “what don’t I know?” Then, I navigated all of my ideas by marking off priority notes, and created a prototype by putting them all into an outline. Finally, I highlighted and fixed by writing the book and cutting out things that weren’t useful, and spell checked it. This approach kept the research moving forwards and prevented clutter from forming, and I will definitely apply it again in the future.

Now coming back to what I said before about understanding ones own perspectives, I found that in exploring the life of Joyce Johnson I could pinpoint where I could draw inspiration from. She describes in interviews how she is influenced by not conforming to the norms of society (in her case by being a strong-minded female), and having a world view which differed from the people closest to her (e.g. how she could not allow herself to live as recklessly as Jack Kerouac). Although I have not lived these exact experiences, both of these topics I could find present somewhere in my own life.

In the excitement of learning about the crazy beat poets, I almost forgot that there was a structure to this unit. We hadn’t just been learning all of these literary devices and poetry techniques for nothing; we were preparing our skills for the exhibition. At this point, the buzz was picking up and discussions on our poetry for the big night was entering our classroom. However, before we could truly be let free on that task, our knowledge needed to be put to the test. As our final exploration of literary devices, we were tasked with completing an in class poetry analysis assessment:

It was a pretty easy task on the surface, as all it included was answering some questions and identifying the devices in a text, but I soon realized there was a challenging catch. This was that we had to complete this analysis within one class, and although that wasn’t a problem for most people, one of my greatest weaknesses is being brief (as you have probably already picked up on). I was aware of this coming in, and was determined to try my best to not go over time. Yet, despite how quickly and hard I worked, I found myself struggling to keep up with the necessary speed needed to complete the task. I analyzed everything as fast as I could and jotted down responses in record time, but still found myself cut short. In the end, I got a grade of 50% as I only completed half the task, and this was a major let down. It was also quite confusing, as I didn’t see any possible way one could have completed the task faster.

Luckily, I was given a chance to write the test again, and this time I was told a crucial detail; that we only had to highlight one example of three literary devices. Knowing this one thing could have saved me so much time with the original analysis, and would have prevented so much stress. In light of this, I am going to make it a priority to not just only do what is needed for a desired result in the future, but define what this result is before doing anything else.

It was a long process, but eventually I got a mark I was happy with on the analysis. It was a good moment for me, as not only was I content with my work but I now had the freedom to move onto what we had all been waiting for; making our poetry books!

Collection of Poems

To kick this part of the unit off, we were given the following outline:

Seems pretty simple right? That’s what I was thinking too, which wasn’t a good thing because this now meant the door to endless possibilities was open. I could theme my book however I wanted, write whatever poetry I wanted, present it however I wanted…how on earth would I choose where to go? It was a little daunting at first, but I found direction by going back to the basics. I asked myself what are the perspectives that either I have or that I see in the world on people, places, issues, and events? Through doing this, I was able to develop the themes of my poetry:

Once I had the themes decided, I then looked back to what we had learned about writing poetry and asked myself “how could I represent these perspectives best through poetry?” This lead to the outlines of each of my poems becoming more flushed out. When they were done, I then got to writing. In some cases, I followed a strict pattern or rhyme scheme. In others, I let my thoughts go wherever they found inspiration. A couple of times, I also reread the poetry we studied and worked to write poetry in the voice of the authors I respected. I also went back and touched up a few of my stream of consciousness works and brought them closer to the theme of perspectives. It was hard work, but I just kept writing and writing and writing, until I had said everything I wanted to say.

In the moment, I was so caught up on getting to book done that I didn’t have a time to actually digest what I was writing. Looking back on it now however, I can say that I am proud of my work. I feel I stepped out of my comfort zone and shared a different, more analytical side of my worldview that often doesn’t come out. I also am proud of how I improved with connecting to a variety of audiences (as I mentioned wanting to improve upon in my Manhatten Project blog post), for I ventured into topics outside of my immediate knowledge base including ageism, religion, and racism. Another thing I can take away from this project is the skill of balancing criteria with enjoying your personal touch. For many of the poems, I made it a goal to insert as many literary devices and pieces of knowledge as possible, which complicated the writing process. When I balanced this with just letting my thoughts unfold however, I ended up with a criteria-meeting product that also had a refreshing personal touch to it, and I think that this is the best way to do things.

When it came to actually creating the book, I decided to use the app Pages. Thinking back to how useful having underlying aesthetic was in the Manhattan Project^2, I then took to coming up with the theme of my book. I didn’t have to look far to do this however, as I could find all of my poems relating back to the concept of perspectives. This is where I got the theme of coins from, as they are such a prominent part of our every day lives and yet based on which way you look at them they can appear completely different. When I was creating the theme for my book, I was for the first time in exhibition history ahead of schedule, and realized that I had time to go a little overboard. I decided to spend some time on a personalized cover and had a lot of fun making it:

 

This showed me that once again, a balance of criteria and personal touch will make an exceptional product, not just in it’s presentation but in how much enjoyment you get from creating it.

For about a month, all that was on our minds was poetry analyzing, poetry writing, and poetry editing. In fact, it was only about a week and a half before the exhibition that we remembered that the presentation and Star Wars aspects were a thing, but it was around then that our poetry books were wrapping up which meant it was time to change course and hit the hyperdrive.

The first thing we needed to do was prepare for our presentations. Each of us was tasked with choosing the best two/three of our poems and practicing until we felt ready to share them. In order to get over the nerves of doing this, we were given the opportunity to present in front of our peers with a mic. After my first performance, I was given the feedback of holding my book out a little farther and being mindful of the time constraints, which I noted. The problem with this feedback however was that it would be a challenge to act upon as I knew that I would forget those things under the stress of the performance. Luckily, I came up with a solution, and that was to enforce a habit. Also just as luckily, I now happened to be an expert on habit forming, especially when it came to creating one through atomically small steps. What I did was every day on my way to and from school I would practice my poetry, and did so with the action I wanted to enforce. This way I was taking up none of my personal time and slowly but surely was building up the muscle memory I would need. This turned out to be a great strategy, as by time the night rolled around I felt more ready than ever. Thanks atomic habits!

Another thing we were tasked with doing was choosing a Star Wars character who we would present as. I chose to be a Tusken Raider, and completed extensive research on their lore to prepare my intro (did you know the grunts they make are a highly sophisticated language?). We were also tasked with bringing the room to life through something known as our…

Cantina Contributions

What would an exhibition be without a spectacular room as it’s stage? This year, the PLP 11’s were given the daunting challenge of turning one of Seycove’s weight rooms into the cantina from Star Wars. To keep this chaotic endeavour slightly under control like we did with our Circle B.C. Expo of last year, we were divided into four groups; Food, Lights, Sound, and Decor. I was in the Decor group, and this was a dangerous place for me to be as instantly my mind was running wild with ideas. I wanted to make animatronics, a TV station, a podcast, and twenty other insane, time-consuming things. Yet, following my streak for this unit, I decided to look at what was really needed, and cut my idea down to simply doing the poster and sign making. Although it might not seem good to take such a detour from great ideas, this is actually what I am most proud of from this project as not only did this save me time and effort, but it also made my final product a lot better. The reason for this is because the theme of the posters I made was a mashup between the Star Wars aesthetic and 1950’s values, and through these I was not only able to complete my contribution but also tie back everything to our theme of perspectives:

Like always, it took a lot of preparation, but when the big night rolled around everything was worth it. I was astounded with how quickly the class was able to transform this unassuming space into an incredible lively atmosphere, and how much work everyone put into their poems. I also put on a band performance with Alivia, Jamie, and Tamara, of the Cantina Theme which was a highlight of the night, and got to talk with all of the other PLP grades about their work. Between being on schedule, having a great product, and not taking on too much work, I can confidently say this exhibition has been the most fun for me yet.

What a remarkable journey this unit has been for me. Learning about poetry and the 1950’s isn’t something we have really looked at before, which has made it all the more interesting to dive into. Overall, I’m proud of the work I’ve done, specifically my poetry and presentations. I’m also proud of how I improved upon my goal of only doing what is needed for a desired result with my cantina contributions, the second chance I had on my poetry analysis, and many other parts of this unit.

I also now am equipped with a new set of tools for future work, including how to conduct better personal research, write and present with literary devices, and how to balance the criteria with a personal touch. Although I’ve gained all this however, it doesn’t mean there isn’t still work to be done. What I am going to continue to improve upon is defining what the required result is of assignments before I dive into them to prevent problems such as what happened with my first poetry analysis.

Now, to come full circle, let’s talk about perspectives. Specifically, how one can use poetry to reflect their perspectives on people, places, issues, and beliefs. Through researching the beat poets, as I mentioned earlier, I have come to understand that poetry is a vibrant art form that can turn pretty much anything into an engaging text. You can have the most unpopular, confusing, or uninteresting perspective out there, but if you have the tools of literary devices, presentation skills, and poetic flow on your side, you can make anyone understand.

“Allen Ginsberg Quote.” A, www.azquotes.com/quote/597077.

CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP15CH3PA3LE.html.

“An Introduction to the Beat Poets.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147552/an-introduction-to-the-beat-poets.