In the MAET program we quite frequently push our students to create, explore and SHARE. The following story exemplifies the power of sharing and why we as a program promote open education (check out our MAET Vault – http://www.msuedtechsandbox.com/MAETVAULT). You never know where a link or connection will lead you!
A few weeks ago, I received this email:
Dear Mr. Mishra,
I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to use you in my project. The only problem is that I canāt find much information about you for my research. If you could, please respond to this e-mail with a little information about your history (i.e.-date and place of birth, family relations, etc.) as well as your inspiration for writing your palindromic poems. Thank you for your support!!!!!
Sincerely,Ā Jake
P.S.- I am an eighth grader from Colorado and an aspiring poet.
Now I donāt consider myself a poet in any serious sense of the word (my dabbling inĀ mathematical poetry or palindromic poetry notwithstanding). But it is great feeling when something you create and put out there in the world connects with someone else, someone who you would never otherwise have met or gotten to know.Ā I wrote back to Jake right away, providing him some information about me and how I got into writing palindromic poetry. Here is what I wrote back to Jake:
Dear Jake ā Thank you so much for writing to me. I am honored to make it to your list of poets and glad that you are interested in palindromic poetry.
As for my history:Ā I am professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing MI. I am originally from India where I studied engineering and design before coming to the US and getting my PhD. My wife is a graphic designer and I have two kids: my son who is a freshman in high school and my daughter who is in 6th grade.
Ever since I was a kid I have always been interested in puzzles and mathematics and poetry and visual design. That I think led to a habit of playing with words and imagesā¦ so I do a lot of doodling and sketching (specially when I in meetings). I am fond of asking questions and looking at things around me in new ways. For instance, I love photography, on my Flickr site you will find photos of silly things like finding alphabets in cracks, and faces in everyday things. See this link and this oneā¦
Then there are the videos I make with my kids. For instance see the new yearās card we made recently.
This also led to my creating ambigrams, which are words that are written in a special way so that they can be read multiple ways. You can find a bunch of such designs on my website.
So I guess, palindromic poetry emerged out of this desire or propensity to see the world in weird ways. And the challenge of writing poems that read the same backward and forward was inherently interesting. I particularly enjoyed writing ones that flipped in their meaning when you cross the half-way point. For instance in the poem āMe as I sitā the poem switches from me watching you to you watching me!
Finally, as must have noticed, from the dates, most of these were written a bunch of years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. I havenāt written too many recently but the fact that they are on my website leads people to them ā and I form all kinds of cool connections ā such as the email I just received from you. A year or so ago I heard from someone who uses my poetry to teach poetry to inmates in prison (how cool is that!). You can read about that here.
Thatās all for now…. I would love to read any palindromic poetry you may have written, if you are comfortable sharing them with me. Thank you again for your interest in my work. I look forward to hearing from you and let me know if there is anything else you need to know.
take careĀ ~ punya
Note: I got Jakeās (and his parentās) permission to post our correspondence on this blog under the condition that I not include his email address or other contact information.
Of course the story didnāt end here. A few weeks later I received an email from Jake that included a palindromic poem written by him. With his permission I include it below. Please note that Jake takes the entire exercise one step further, his poem reverses word by word (rather than line by line, as I tend to do). This is incredibly difficult ā and to top it all Jakeās poem is a great poem by any measure.
Falling Snow
snow falling gently
on stomping feet
cold stinging
the teasing and laughing children
sculpted beautifully ā crystals form
flakes dancing gracefully
tumble and spin
spin and tumble
gracefully dancing flakes
form crystals ā beautifully sculpted
children laughing and teasing the
stinging cold
feet stomping on
gently falling snow
How cool is that. And what an amazing world we live in! Is there any other time period in human history where a professor of Indian origin would connect up with an eighth grader from Colorado over poems that run backwards and forwards! It is through this open sharing of ideas and artifacts, and resulting flowering of individual and shared creativity, that the Internet truly gets its power.
Keep your eyes out on the MAET Vault this summer as we will be populating the database with more resources not only from our program faculty, but from MAET students who are taking this work and repurposing it for K12 settings. Additionally, make sure to follow the #maet hashtag on twitter as we are making a concerted effort in our summer programs to create, create, create (explore) and share, share, share!
Sincerely.
~punya