Wednesday 26 March 2014

Trees and virtual teaching

This post contains two poems.

I entered the first one in the Guardian Poster Poem competition for March 2014, in which the mode of entry was to upload the poem among the blog comments.  The poem was written in 2004, as my entry in another competition -- to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Joyce Kilmer's poem 'Trees'.


TREES AGAIN, BEFORE THE HURRICANE



So the poem by Joyce Kilmer

adds trees to what we remember

1914 for. Another year --

of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster,

of the Hungerford massacre,

of the underground King’s Cross fire,

of no summer -- I read from cover to cover

Mitchell and Wilkinson’s Trees of Britain and Northern Europe;

and the way its entries trace

lines between the names of place

and evoke the scent of trees

marked it with poetic grace. 


The second poem is by way of a makeweight: a haiku.  Clare gave a presentation, at the March 2014 Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds Inter-Disciplinary Project conference in Prague, on her report Higher education teaching in virtual worldsConference participants all rose to the informal challenge to write haiku on their presentations.  Clare is tweeting hers, and she suggested that I, though unconnected with the conference, might like to have a go.  This is it:


SL failed to blaze 
every candle at both ends 
but it can help teach. 

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