An idea

Big poetry festival in G.Hill's "writing the western landscape" class today. Just coming up with the idea right now. Seven brand new poems by Philips, Weber, Kane, Wilson, Trussler, Hyland and Smith. Seven groups of English students commanded to "somehow do the poem" in front of the class. Get their bodies moving, figure out ways in and out of the poem, make the poem happen for us, etc. We'll take a half hour today, present the poems on Friday. This will be a challenge for these students, most of whom have never met a poem they didn't resist. But freed of any obligation to figure poems out or get what the author is trying to say (I can barely utter those words), they'll come up with something useful. Poems as invitations, not demands.

Later this same day: So far, so good. There's talk of surprise, colour, bags or real leaves, simultaneous translations. As applied to, or sampled from, poems in which (to make a long story short) figures vanish into nature and don't come back.