Palindromic poetry: Falling Snow

by | Wednesday, May 04, 2011

A few weeks ago I had written about an email that I received from an eighth grader in Colorado. Jake, a budding poet, was interested in learning more about me in the context of some palindromic poetry I had written many years ago. I wrote back to Jake (you can see the correspondence here) and a couple of days ago I received another email from him, this time containing a palindromic poem written by him. With his permission, I am including his email and poem below:

Punya,
Here is the palindromic poem that I wrote recently, but I made it so that the words are reversed instead of just the lines. It adds another layer of difficulty to creating it, and I recommend trying it if you get the chance.

Falling Snow

snow falling gently
on stomping feet
cold stinging
the teasing and laughing children
sculpted beautifully – crystals form
flakes dancing gracefully
tumble and spin
spin and tumble
gracefully dancing flakes
form crystals – beautifully sculpted
children laughing and teasing the
stinging cold
feet stomping on
gently falling snow

How awesomely cool is that! I wrote back to him right away saying

Jake. This is awesome!!!! I just shared it with my family and we were unanimous in our appreciation and praise for your achievement. Not only is it a doubly palindromic poem, an achievement in and of itself, it is a wonderful poem in it’s own right….

Thank you so much for sharing this with me. It completely made my day.

Don’t you just love the open-architecture of the web (and why I resist the closed worlds of Facebook).

Topics related to this post: Art | Blogging | Creativity | Design | Fun | Personal | Poetry | Stories | Worth Reading | Writing

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Sketching MSUrbanSTEM

Sketching MSUrbanSTEM

I have been playing with my iPad a bit, experimenting with sketching and drawing apps for a few months now. I have realized that it is important to give yourself a task, a clear end-goal to work towards if I had to get anywhere. So with that in mind, I decided to...

Cool i-Images at MICDS

I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending...

Scrivener vs. Writer

A NYTimes article on word-processing versus writing (or scrivenering??): An interface of one's own. What stood out was this description of writing being more than just the putting of words on a screen -- but rather of seeing it this complex, often non-linear...

Browsing for gender

Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows: Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 24% Likelihood of you being MALE is 76% Try it out for yourself, or read more about how...

Manoranjan ka baap

The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL...

Color me Creative

I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn - and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That's her down there blowing bubbles...

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

Much has been written about Steve Jobs in the past few weeks since his passing but the best piece I have come across is the eulogy by his sister Mona Simpson. Mona Simpson is an author and professor of writing and delivered this eulogy on Oct. 16 at his memorial...

TPACK and new literacies

Over 150 years ago Herbert Spencer wrote an essay titled What Knowledge is of Most Worth in which he bemoaned the fact that most of the discussion around what is worth knowing in his day and age was based not on any rational discussion of the issues and the benefits...

Undo this

Wouldn't it be great if life came with an undo key-stroke-combination? Just a thought I threw out today during a meeting which led to a discussion of how this could be a great movie idea. Seems intriguing...

2 Comments

  1. Punya Mishra

    Thanks Sean. I am in complete agreement with what you wrote.
    I have been wanting to write a longer rant about these “closed” spaces – don’t we have too much of that already… maybe some day when I get a moment (or two). ~ punya

    Reply
  2. Sean Nash

    Awesome. I too, think this is a fantastic poem. And really, your testimony to the open world of the Internet (as opposed to walled gardens of many flavors) is 100% in line with my feelings on that topic. I’m pretty sure I just stated the obvious. However, even in those places where teachers are themselves allowed to share openly, as well as to bring their students into that philosophy… such openness is not s static state.

    You might be surprised at how (even in open places) much constant hard work it takes to continue to maintain such openness. It seems that many of the pockets of openness we see in educational spaces today are places where teachers seized an opportunity to do an end-around on sleeping tech departments who allowed the web2 revolution to pass unfettered beyond their watchful eye.

    Here’s betting we soon see significant “power grabs” emerge all over as traditional tech departments struggle to regain control over the information landscape in our schools. Preventing that eventuality, and stepping back to a simpler age might seem easier and safer to many in position to do so, but in my opinion, this is not a best-case scenario. I will continue to use my influence to insure that students are given agency over the tools they wield and the spaces in which they interact, learn, and thrive.

    Thanks again for championing this sort of sharing and collaborative inspiration.

    Sean

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Deep-Play.com | answer the question - […] Jake (from Colorado). Read the correspondence between Jake and Punya here. […]

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *