Snap To It: A Creative Challenge

April is National Poetry Month. This year, I decided to celebrate it by giving myself a challenge: create one original piece of Shapchat art each day that would combine some kind of visual with a line from a poem.

Going into the project, my main goal was to learn Snapchat. As a parent and teacher, I have seen it become the preferred social media platform for young people, so I wanted to get a sense of it. What I discovered, though, went beyond how to use the app. Here are 3 of the more important things I realized.

I like poetry.

Sounds funny coming from an English teacher, but I don’t spend a lot of time with poetry in my classes. Typically, I’ll throw 3-4 poems at my students over the course of a year. And these end up being my go-tos. Since this project required me to find 30 lines of poetry, I had to range far beyond the old standbys. This searching and reading reminded me of how powerfully poets combine language and brevity in order to convey their thoughts about the deepest, most complex questions confronting human beings.

Tim O’Brien, my favorite writer, says that all we have is 26 letters and a few punctuation marks through which we try to make ourselves understood to others. Poets are in the business of using these letters and punctuation marks to make concise observations about our world. Gabriel Orozco, one of my favorite artists, says that he wants to be intimate with the world, and art is the attempt to build bridges so others can also experience that intimacy. Poets use a slender toolbox indeed in order to build their bridges.

I like to use my technology for a purpose.

Here I am thinking about the way so many of us fall into the scroller trap. Think about how often you or people you know fill downtime with tech time. For years, I resisted getting a phone. Now that I have one, I find myself reaching for it when I have a few minutes with nothing to do. Like when I am picking up my kids from soccer practice, am in a waiting room, am on a train. More often than not, I am looking for nothing in particular. It is mindless scrolling. I have tried to be more aware of this tendency and to resist it.

My poetry project gave me a goal or destination for these moments. Throughout April, when I found myself reaching for my phone to fill in some seemingly empty moments, I went to poets.org or the poetry foundation and read poems. I was always on the lookout for the poems and even specific lines that made me say, “whoa! yes!” For the lines that gave me that chill factor. Instead of tuning out during the downtime, this searching kept me thinking. Interestingly, I found myself putting away the phone after a particularly compelling poem in order to think about what I just read and how I might use it in my project. As an educator, I have participated in numerous conversations about helping kids to become thoughtful, critical, and creative citizens, online and off. This project helped me to achieve these goals.

Speaking of creativity. I like to create (and to give myself creative challenges).

A few years back, I read a book by David Gauntlett called Making is Connecting. It is wonderful and I highly recommend it. In his writing, Gauntlett offers his definition for everyday, personal creativity. For Gauntlett, this kind of creativity is typified by making something novel for oneself. Too often, he found that definitions of creativity were written with society in mind. For something to be considered creative, it needed to be judged and accepted by a community of experts. Like Gauntlett, this view of creativity ignores the creative urge we all feel. When I made the Snapchat images, I was primarily concerned with making something pleasing to me. I knew others would see my creations. That is the point of social media. However, my main concern was with my experience. How did I feel while in the process? What kinds of decisions did I need to make as I created? How well did I execute those decisions? What did I think about the finished work?

Taken together, these questions and this thought process gave me a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency, and a deep sense of satisfaction. Consider how many decisions we make everyday, and, of those decisions, how many are done without thinking. This kind of creative project provided me with thoughtful decisions. Color choices, layouts, text position: for such small works, the choices could be almost overwhelming. But these choices required intentionality, and I liked that feeling.

Ultimately, the project led me to this: Yes, I could be a creator, not a consumer. I could bring something new into the world, even if on a small scale. I could translate an idea into a tangible work. I feel accomplishment, even when I struggled. Or especially when I did. Well worth the investment.

     

Here is a link to the entire album.