The Poetry Vlog Workshop Prep Kit

Table of Contents (each linked to point in packet vs. page numbers)

Navigating This Prep Packet

Project History and Impact:

Project Stakes and Overview:

Project Timeline:

Requests for Workshop:

Heuristic

APPENDIX A: SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

APPENDIX B: PODCAST DEMOGRAPHICS

APPENDIX C: EXAMPLE “COVERS” (YT THUMBNAILS)

APPENDIX D: EXISTING WEBSITE

APPENDIX E: PRINT OUTREACH MOCK-UPS

APPENDIX F: NEWSLETTER EXAMPLE

APPENDIX G: SAMPLE SYLLABUS INTEGRATION

APPENDIX H: GUEST PROMPT KIT

REFERENCES AND READINGS

READINGS: LICHTENSTEIN & EWP NEW TEXTBOOK OUTLINE

Navigating This Prep Packet

I am hoping in our workshop to have useful feedback on how to narrow the scope of the project, but also have it more efficiently fulfill the original goals. To help our discussion, then, I’ve created a variety of (optional) tools on “where the project is now” and “where I hope it will go”:

1. Hyperlinks: in the summary, I hyperlink to examples from the nascent days of the project to the most recent, as well as the different platforms and material to which is similar. You do not have to click on all of these to get an idea of the project, of course. You are welcome, however, to click through them and see different evolutions of the project. I am self-taught, so I made a point of referring to episodes across the different stages. It will contextualize the “where I’d like to go” part of the presentation on Tuesday.

2. Appendices: this project has required developing some unexpected tool kits, such as print materials, research on demographics and platforms, emails, etc. Two are screen recordings; others are .pdfs that have been added in.

3. References: these are key texts that you can read, and which I reference lightly, but they are just that: loose references. I am

4. Readings: I am including a popular article on poetry, activism, and pop culture to help get the “non-poets” up to speed on why “The Poetry Vlog” is multi-genre and multi-disciplinary project. The second is a handout version we received as TA’s when the EWP changed its textbook; this book has been crucial to my understanding on how to approach multimodal literature and scholarship. It also outlines the outcomes, which any integration of TPV in a classroom would need to meet. I chose to not include any scholarly essays because my primary concern is communicating the existing genres, modes, and demographics.

Project History and Impact:

“The Poetry Vlog” is a weekly YouTube video series and daily podcast distribution in its second season of production. It is dedicated to discussing contemporary poetry as it intersects with gender, race, and sexuality studies. These open access audio-visual mediums extend the print publication practices of poets and poetry scholars to create reciprocal, engaged community dialogues beyond the college classroom and in conversation with popular culture. The Poetry Vlog began in Summer 2018 as supplementary, multimodal materials to scholarly and poetry classroom; the second season through Winter and Spring 2019 incorporated poets, scholars, and related guests that were integrated with course texts (APPENDIX G) in ENGL 182, ENGL 382, BISIA 207, and BISIA 310 classrooms. With this grant’s funds, higher grade equipment was purchased and has been used to film around 25 episodes for “Season 3,” which will feature guests whose texts are taught in the course, concepts are crucial to the course outcomes, or who offer student-to-student insights on course topics.

In its current form, TPV hosts three streams of content: “Guest Interlocutor Episodes,” “Flash Briefing Poetry Readings,” and “Patrick with Pop Culture.” Guest interlocutors participate in tri-weekly episodes distributed across YouTube and Podcast forms. These episodes feature guests that range from students at the UW Seattle and Bothell to community stakeholders such as arts organizations, to scholars and poets. These episodes are under 30 minutes and incorporate supplemental audio-visual cues and built-in reference links. The second stream of content, “Flash Briefing Poetry Readings,” is a podcast-only weekday reading of one poem illustrating political hope and/or historical critique. The third stream is a tri-monthly segment, “Patrick and Pop Culture,” which emerged from a collaboration with Patrick Milian at The Digital Humanities Summer Institute. It brings his modernist sound studies background and my cultural studies research together through pop music analysis, creating content for both of our literature and composition classrooms as recorded, undergrad-accessible lectures.

All three segments—Patrick and Pop Culture, daily Flash Briefing Poetry Readings, and Guest Interlocutors—are also available in podcast form, while Instagram (@thepoetryvlog), Facebook (@thepoetryvlog), a host site (thepoetryvlog.com), and Twitter (@thepoetryvlog) offer audio-visual platforms for accessing content and to create digital community outreach. Upcoming and past guests thus far have included Seattle’s Civic Poet, Anastacia-Renee Tolbert; Western Washington University Professor, scholar, and poet, Jane Wong; The University of Toronto scholar and poet Sarah Dowling; and The Seattle Review editor and visual poetry comics publisher, Gabrielle Bates, among 13 other published scholars, poets, artists, graduate students, and undergraduate students. In addition to published names, for instance, collaborators have included UW students and community stakeholders such as Portland visual artist, Andrea Crawford, and CHID major, poet, and performer, Ananya Garg. There have also been youth partnerships, such as an extended collaboration with The National Youth Poet Laureate Program.

As an existing digital, open access, interdisciplinary project, The Poetry Vlog in all three streams builds coalitions across multiple, at times disparate publics through the power of poetry. The YouTube channel and podcast extends print publication practices of poets and poetry scholars to create reciprocal, engaged community dialogues beyond the college classroom and in conversation with popular culture. While The Poetry Vlog has existed as a side project not yet integrated into classrooms, its second season opened with the podcast already having received over 9,000 “listens” and the YouTube channel exceeding 2,500 “views.” While I test-taught some of the content in Spring 2019, AY 2020-2019’s “third season” will be designed explicitly for syllabus and community learning integration, as well as more technologically and visually advanced materials. My longer-term goal is for TPV to become a nationally recognized and institutionally accredited public, open access archive as well as ongoing research method in the social media era.

Project Stakes and Overview:

The Poetry Vlog emerges from an interdisciplinary background: I hold an MFA and publications in poetry, while also having scholarly publications from and having just completed my dissertation work on multi-modal contemporary activist poetries from a literary and cultural studies analysis of power. This combined research with creative and scholarly publication history coalesces around a public-facing and university teaching background, which includes teaching in Detroit Public Schools, Community Colleges, open access State universities, and Research Level 1 classrooms. As a free resource, then, I aim to make The Poetry Vlog into a teaching tool accessible across diverse institutions and learning levels. To support this goal, Season 3 will include higher profile guests, extensive collaboration with social media, disability resources, and maker space colleagues. Further, it will be explicitly framed as a pedagogical and research approach emerging at a crucial moment at the intersections of cultural studies, anti-racist pedagogies, digital humanities turns, and interdisciplinary, public-facing arts and scholarship.

1. Intellectual Ambitions (or: why poetry as scholarship):

The intellectual backbone of The Poetry Vlog asks how the Digital Humanities and Public Scholarship might impactfully intervene upon anti-racist pedagogies and coalitional scholarship and arts methods across disciplines. For instance: Black Feminist Barbara Christian published a now seminal argument in her essay and eventual book, “The Race for Theory.” Christian, writing into the upsurge of cultural studies and postmodern scholarly texts, called for non-traditional scholarly modes to be treated as the embodied and necessary scholarly modes that they are. She called out the mid-century shift from artists and scholars being equated as the same to artists’ work being treated as objects of knowledge corresponding to marginalized bodies and their knowledges. Simultaneously, the Bush family and related political actors funded a late 1980’s “return” to poetry’s broad-based roots by becoming primary donors to The Poetry Foundation. In the rhetoric of making poetry less elitist and for the people, the funding intended to sway poetry audiences away from otherwise insurgences from feminist, queer, non-White poets, such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Cherríe Moraga. As both a poet and scholar, I repeatedly return to this historical moment, wherein Black and anti-colonial feminists and queer communities argued for a less monolithic art/knowledge and print/lived binary. Both poetry and scholarly cultures through the 1990’s and 2000’s nevertheless continued to center print-based publications, favoring monographic essays or print-based poetry books in elitist niche circles. The contemporary moment marks a shift in both discourses: despite 1980’s cultural studies interventions – that non-scholarly texts are enacted and rich modes of knowledge production – widely in university programs, research methods uphold the textual monograph as scholarly success.

Responding to this contradiction, institutions increasingly fund public scholarship, and departments are beginning to hybridize with creative writing. Too, poetry has begun the work under new leadership at The Poetry Foundation to fund performance-based voices that leverage poetry’s affective modes for social change, such as The Dark Noise Collective, Kundiman, and Cave Canem. Nevertheless, poetry and scholarly print-based and podcast media and commentary remain in insider language. In addition, both poetry and academic audiences face gatekeeping Doctoral and MFA program costs, elusive specialized discourses, institutionalized publication houses. This makes reciprocal engagement across wider disciplines and non-academic or poetry audiences difficult.

However, these small shifts mark a hopeful historical moment: multi-modal texts are seeping outside of institutionalized and print-based publication walls into the more open access social platforms available online where coalitions meaningfully emerge. Free social media platforms, such as Twitter “essays,” Instagram photo essays, YouTube social commentary, and more offer open access public-facing tools that inspire comment threads and reciprocal engagement. They refuse singular lecturer or poetic output, creating accountable reciprocity that pushes knowledge production into unexpected relational -- at times coalitional for social change, such as #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, -- methods. Public scholarship has always been produced, but as the “viral” methods of multi-media and interactive tools emerge, so too does a hopeful moment for coalitions across disciplines and community stakeholders, including artists and scholars, for new knowledge, poetry, and scholarly practices.

2. Programmatic Ambitions and Technological Underpinnings:

The YouTube channel targets undergraduate students who lean heavily on YouTube for entertainment and educational content (APPENDIX A), while the Podcast targets upper-level undergraduates, college graduates, and graduate students (See APPENDIX B). While valuable podcasts dedicated to poetry and social conversations exist, such as “Commonplace” and “VS Podcast,” students comment that 45 minutes or more lengths, combined with “insider” language, feel akin to reading a discipline-specific scholarly essay. These podcasts also explicitly lack engagement with scholars in Humanities fields that are not necessarily producing art themselves. In turn, cultural studies lectures and discussions hosted in video form online are not adapted for YouTube and Podcast genres, which have unique audio-visual conventions for maintaining listener and viewer attention, much less with non-academic audiences. The Poetry Vlog thus extends the reach of academic knowledge and widens scholarly publication opportunities and modalities, bringing scholars and poets onto platforms where cultural studies scholarship and poetry commentary have rarely, if ever, been adequately adapted to unique social media conventions. In this way, The Poetry Vlog responds to a moment in which political unrest generates media-rooted #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, and #banthewall movements, as well as the sudden resurgence in poetry readership, which has more than doubled in the past four years (Lichtenstein). For publicly-engaged literary and cultural studies scholars, then, it is tactical, even critical to employ digital platforms from YouTube to Instagram to podcasts when staging discussions about race, gender, sexuality—already extant on these platforms—but further, to utilize these platforms to meet and increase public interest in the arts.

On the one hand, The Poetry Vlog is a multi-modal, open access pedagogical tool that might complement and facilitate the teaching of multi-modal literature and composition, especially empowering students who, both in and outside the classroom, are most historically marginalized. For instance: scholars appear on episodes to explain terms otherwise experienced jargon, such as “neoliberal multiculturalism.” They enact this pedagogy through short-form pop culture analysis, such as close-reading a Super Bowl Coca-Cola Ad, that instructors can pair with the scholars’ niche textbooks. The added mode of podcast and YouTube episode thus transforms specialized academic knowledge into accessible content in and beyond undergraduate courses, further highlighting Cultural Studies and Arts knowledge as socio-politically relevant through popularly recognizable cultural references and critiques. In turn, poets and artists appear on episodes to explain how relatable, popular culture references, such as “BoJack Horseman,” inform otherwise niche print-based work, such as feminist poetry comics. Community stakeholders invested in cultural critique and production who find print-based, institutionalized poetry and academic knowledges impenetrable thus acquire unique insight into literary analyses’ and production’s culture relevance. In turn, artists in niche mediums are placed in direct conversation with scholars in niche theoretical fields, creating unexpected sites for social and knowledge circulation and collaboration that coalesce around a public-facing and student-based interface. In this way, The Poetry Vlog works with poets and non-poets alike to build on poetry’s newly doubled readership base, which has been partially mobilized digital social justice movements, such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, and #banthewall. On the other hand, The Poetry Vlog joins cultural analysis to action-oriented, hopeful praxis: hope is not just a feeling, but a call to action, and as The Poetry Vlog’s dialogues demonstrate poetry, as always, is already here to meet it. In other words: vlog episodes continuously center the cultural and scholarly production existent already in equitable arts and humanities communities.

To extend multimodal composition practice and research, TPV also includes print materials and a monthly Newsletter. Print products (APPENDIX E) are namely custom postcards with The Poetry Vlog imaging on the front and a pre-stamped and addressed space for those who pick them up from coffee shops and bookstores. The postcards will prompt readers to mail in comments about the project as well as what they are reading, listening to, and watching that gives them hope. Engaged audience members will also receive custom stickers targeted to undergraduate students and magnets for upper classman and faculty. Finally, professional grade equipment and software will be used in the YouTube and podcast production: Final Cut Pro X will be used for editing video content; Audacity will be used for podcasts; Adobe Illustrator, Spark, and Designer will be used for YouTube thumbnails (APPENDIX C) and visually branded content, YouTube and Anchor.fm will be used to distribute videos and podcasts across 11 podcast platforms; thepoetryvlog.com will procure ten years of its domain name through GoDaddy.com and will be hosted through Wix.com premium (APPENDIX D). TPV also has its own @thepoetryvlog email account, which is available through Wix.com, while the same site’s templates for professional emails will be used to distribute monthly newsletters. These newsletters (APPENDIX F) will summarize the month’s content and offer links to and highlights.

Project Timeline:

From June 2019 to August 2019, I will revise Seasons 1 and 2 for consistent metadata and descriptions, as well as ease of navigation and improved keyword search. From late July to end of September 2019, I will edit the existing episodes scheduled for Season 3.

During Season 3 (AY 2019 – 2020), guest episodes will posted every three weeks in synchronization with the course syllabi designed across the different courses I will be teaching. For outreach beyond my own classrooms, I will send these updated episodes as posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, featuring clips from the videos and podcasts as part of each episode’s promotional post. Twice daily the @thepoetryvlog social media accounts will also interact with related content found through active hashtags, such as #poetrycommunity and #phdchat. Bi-weekly, postcards and stickers will be dropped off in local book stores and cafes, such as Open Books Poem Emporium and Fran’s Chocolates. Monthly newsletters will also begin.

By August 2019, increased technological capacities, as well as a critical mass of regular features with local scholars, poets, artists, and community stakeholders, will make The Poetry Vlog a useful tool across audiences both within Humanities departments and beyond the university walls.

In December 2019, I will be begin outreach for Season 4 guests, emphasizing students and community stakeholders as opposed to Season 3’s primarily “published author” guest base. I will begin reaching out to institutions for partnership in January 2020: The Poetry Foundation, MLA, Poets.org, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, etc.

Requests for Workshop:

February – June 2020, I will apply for grants that will enable students to become involved in producing and sustaining the project. I.e.: I go on the job market Fall 2019. In my applications, I plan to propose that the project continue on the campus wherein I am hired. As faculty, I will be eligible for grants that include reimbursing research assistants for helping with outreach, design, production, and maintenance. I will also apply for grants that will reimburse an accessibility specialist, who will conver the materials into more accessible forms, such as closed captions, font sizes and navigation of the site, image descriptions on social media, and so forth.

I have a few specific areas where I am looking for feedback that will make this possible:

• What changes need to be made (aesthetically, platform-wise, description-based, etc.) to help translate this project into not just a pedagogical tool, but a research method supportive of diverse campus learning?

• What organizations should be contacted for collaboration, and what is the best method of outreach?

• How can the print-based materials more impactfully reach a broad-based, non-academic audience?

• How can the digital materials be made more transparently useful to other educators, researchers, and artists at universities beyond this campus?

• The project is currently an enormous workload: what are some methods for making it more sustainable?

• Based on the short clip, what are ways to better balance YouTube and podcast conventions with scholarly and poetry community conventions?

• Based on the existing prompt (APPENDIX J), what are ways to solicit more effective preparation and engagement from guest scholars and poets?

Heuristic