Just for fun I have been participating in an on-line creativity course with my favorite group of learning revolutionaries, the East Side Institute in New York.
Twenty three of us have been exploring "Everyday creativity: Teaching and learning for the 21st Century."
This week's task was to be creative whenever we encountered a problem. Instead of rushing to a solution, we would write a poem. Just for fun.
Poetry is a form of written/spoken language. The words are selected and arranged so thee express ideas with a musical, rhythmic or sensuous quality. A kind of aural beauty with it's own unique patterns.
It helped me think about the relationship between the beauty of natural things and tools that humans create, and how we have become "pattern creators" as well as "pattern detectors".
We seem to be genetically disposed to discover beauty in everything. In all its different guises. It's how we make sense of the world. We look for events/things that occur more than once, so we can develop a rule for dealing with what we discover. So we can switch control from the ever-vigilant right frontal lobes to the reliably automatic left. And live in cognitive peace. It's what brains do. It's what sets us apart from our fellow species on planet earth.
We look for repetition, diversity, symmetry, simplicity, fecundity, regularity, self-similarity and brilliance.
The patterns underpin our creative nature. They are found in the rhythms of day-night, the seasons, animal gaits, heart beats, menstrual cycles and the tides. The spiral nature of galaxies, whirlpools, cyclones, the water disappearing down the plug-hole. The beautiful clockwise and counterclockwise spirals of sunflower seeds. The fractal (self-similar) nature of fern leaves, lightning, blood vessels, the alveoli of my lungs and the arrangements of my neurons. Waves of every kind - the windblown waves in sand dunes and oceans or the ripples on a pond. The sounds of birdsong or the cries of animals. The flocking of birds and the shoaling of fish as the fly or swim a fixed distance apart.
We humans have created our own "species" of patterns. Language, music, mathematics, science, the arts and laws.
And starting with these psychological representations, we render them in physical form to create works of art, products and tools we use in our daily lives.
Human-made patterns now rival the natural world with their own intrinsic beauty. And sometimes we mistake the models, theories and simulations for the real thing, and spend an unhealthy amount of time living in the world of our imaginations, rather than in balance with our fellow humans.
Here is an example of a mental model, a powerful way of thinking about how we engage in the world, developed by Howard Gardner, which has it's own intrinsic beauty. It's what Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind, would call a superb theory or model. Imagine using this model as the skeleton for a poem...see below for how you can write a line of poetry for each characteristic.
1 Bodily-kinesthetic
2 Interpersonal
3 Verbal-linguistic
4 Logical-mathematical
5 Intrapersonal
6 Visual-spatial
5 Intrapersonal
6 Visual-spatial
7 Musical
8 Naturalistic
You might like to try these Yes-and poetry games in pairs or as a large group. When we write this way together, it's as if there is an "invisible controller" of the group, that organizes the flow of what we do.
1. Brilliance Yes-and poetry game: On your turn, add three words which express your Brilliance (completeness, blissfulness, rightness, majesty, purity, strength, joy, compassion, love, clarity). Each line of the poem should start with - I feel [complete, or other aspect] when...
2. The Christian Bok Yes-and (Eunoia/beautiful thinking) poetry game: On your turn, add three words at a time, using only the vowel "a". Start with: Abracadabra alarms all
3. The no "e" game Yes-and poetry game. Write a poem, two words at a time, with no letter "e". Start with - All aphrodisiacs
4. Spectacular words Yes-and poetry game. Add two or three word combinations of superlatives/spectacular words only using these starter words - Exquisite phantasmagoria.
5. The Multiple Intelligence Yes-and poetry game. Take turns to create a poem where each line is an Improv game allows us to explore the intelligences. Finish where you started. 1 Bodily-kinesthetic, 2 Interpersonal, 3 Verbal-linguistic, 4 Logical-mathematical, 5 Intrapersonal, 6 Visual-spatial, 7 Musical, 8 Naturalistic
For example:
1. Fly like a bird, up in the sky.
2. Ask each other what you desire
3. Employ a metaphor for saying goodbye
4. 1,1,2,3,5...give it a try!
5. Close your eyes and imagine a lie,
6. Draw a picture that smells like hot pie,
7. Sing us a song that's like angels on high,
8. Listen to the birds as they fly through the sky.
6. The retro-viral poetry game: This is a game that should create new versions of itself, like a retro-virus. It should infect the brain, help create something more spectacular/interesting, and then become contagious.
Create another, more spectacular version of these kinds of questions, that play movies/songs in your mind or tunes on your body...."Thinking about all the different colors of the sky, what colors were they, what was happening at the time and what is the pattern?
For example....
What color is da sky?
Blue you say.
Nay. Think about every other day.
When it was green or black
Or even red or grey.
Write a verse,
Perhaps worse than this,
That gets your brain or body
Laughing it's *....* off.
Spectacular? No. It's just play
7. Starting with a mental model, list all the attributes, then create a line of verse for each attribute. Jungian archetypes, Servant Leadership actions (Haiku), Polarities (Managership-leadership), family roles, Six Thinking Hats kinds of thinking, the senses, the seasons.
