The gift that keeps on giving, or Why I love the web

by | Sunday, April 24, 2011

I recently 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 can’t 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, Jake

P.S.- I am an eighth grader from Colorado and an aspiring poet.

Now I don’t consider myself a poet in any serious sense of the word (my dabbling in 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. Here is what I wrote back to Jake:

Dear Jake —
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: 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 images… 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 one…

 

Then there are the videos I make with my kids. For instance see the new year’s card we made recently.

This also led to my creating ambigrams, which are words that are written in a special ways 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 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 “Me as I sit” 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 haven’t written too many recently but the fact that they are on my website leads people to them – and I form all kinds of cool connections – 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.

That’s 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 care ~ punya

Note: I got Jake’s (and his parent’s) permission to post our correspondence on this blog under the condition that I not include his email address or other contact information.

Many moons ago I had written about the idea of the web as small pieces loosely connected (read Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined) that allow people to pursue their passions and share it with the world at large. This is what gives the web its power, and this is also why I am not as comfortable with the barricaded worlds created by Facebook, which would not have allowed someone like Jake to easily find me, (but that is a rant for another day).

 

 

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Science teachers and social justice

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Steve Wagenseller, a student in my 817 Learning Technology by Design seminar wrote something so cool in the class forum that I felt that it was worth recording on my blog... ...One of the differences between art versus design is that a user has to approach the art,...

A couple of images… (for the heck of it)

Here are two images I created recently... August is the 8th month, so here is a little design to celebrate that fact! I had no particular reason to create this... but then again why let that get in the way of doing something... anything! The next is an image based on...

Academic novels

I have been reading Moo by Jane Smiley, off and on for a while now. It is a satire of academia set in a fictional Mid-western university called Moo U. It has been suggested that Moo U is a stand in for Iowa State, an university I know well since Smita went to school...

The civilizing effects of technology

Martin Amis was recently interviewed in Guernica (Amis Unfiltered, Santiago Wills interviews Martin Amis). The interview covered a wide range of topics, literature, Obama, and a fascinating digression on the relationship between food and national character!  What...

Silver Lining for Learning at UNESCO: Celebrating 5 Years of Innovation

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East Lansing in the NYTimes

Olivia Judson has a great column in the NYTimes about evolution. Today's column titled "Stop the mutants" is a thought experiment on how evolution would fare if all mutations were to magically stop. It is an interesting article, and in keeping with her previous...

A Systems view of creativity

A Systems view of creativity

Our series of articles related to the broad topic of Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century in the journal TechTrends continues with two new articles. The first focuses on developing a systems view of creativity,...

Koehler & Mishra (2005)

One of the important papers in the TPACK sequence is Koehler & Mishra (2005). In this paper we developed and administered a survey to measure the evolution of TPACK as people engaged in a design task. This research complements our previous empirical work (Koehler,...

2 Comments

  1. Punya Mishra

    Gaurav, that is cool… most unexpected and unasked for and hence twice the fun (actually since it is almost palindromic, it would be 3.5 times the fun). ~ punya

    Reply

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