News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education
Jan. 31
At U of All People, WAC, or Writing Across the Curriculum, has become big, and it’s no longer just for students writing in a chemistry class. Even faculty and administrators have joined the trend toward hybridization and crossovers. See the printout below, found in a board room after a splice of an academic administrators’ meeting with a poetry workshop.
PowerPoint Poetry
A LYRIC PRESENTATION
GAME PLAN
Opening
□Introduction
1. The sun glinting on the oak-hued seminar
table at an angle of four o’clock
2. Minutes from previous meeting
3. The sobriety of our endeavors edges us forward
□Address to Reader
1. You, who so resemble us
2. See report from 2007
□Establish Issues
1. The growing fiscal debt
2. Greenbacks drifting into a bottomless pit
Imagery
□List of Things
1. The Chancellor’s Fund for Excellence,
the new Dana Gioia Residential College
2. Open maws, fevered hands reaching out
□This Thing Is Like That Thing
1. The debt is an untamed lawn
2. The fund drive is like a mower that has
come upon boulders hidden in the grass
□Juxtapose Words with Cute Visuals
1. Balance the budget;
budget the balance (chiasmus)
➼ ♬ $ :-) ☜
2. “Money is a kind of poetry”
— Wallace Stevens
moolah ≈, $, ,
Other Parts
□Such as Enjambment and Cut ✄ Faculty Raises ✍
□Bulleted Lines
•Impact
•Decisiveness
•Terse tercets
□Miscellaneous
1. Insert arresting metaphor here
2. Pause for caesura and coffee break
Theme
□The Importance of Art
1. Humanities are the loss-leader
of the academy
2. “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
3. A glint in a business major’s
contact lens
□Budget Shortfall
1. There is never, no, never enough
2. Imagine a plant that grows shorter instead of taller
every year. What soil nourishes it?
3. Impose hiring freeze
□Cosmetic Measures, Like Brushing Pancake Makeup over a Burn
1. Building for the Future,
a four-step plan in quatrains
(first draft)
2. The smell of fresh paint from the newly renovated
library lounge
Conclusion
□Endings Are Always Hard
1. Seated in silence, hands matched as if in prayer
2. “In my end is my beginning”
□Repeat Earlier Points
1. Dana Gioia Residential College
2. Chancellor’s Fund for Excellence
3. The angle of the sun, now declining at five o’clock
□Any Questions?
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Is there a text in this class?
Barbara, at 10:50 am EST on January 31, 2008
I love the slur “His knowledge of the subject is PowerPoint deep.”
In this case, Galef’s poetic excellence is PowerPoint deep.
Frizbane Manley, at 9:05 am EST on February 2, 2008
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Of course those of us in composition who have followed Tom Romano have been using the multigenre approach to writing for years and I have to admit that I wasn’t enchanted with the poem because it lacked doodling...nice try though!
Will Hochman, at 10:00 am EST on January 31, 2008