H.O.M.A.G.O: Digitally Composing a Poem

During the week of June 18th I had the opportunity to spend four days with other TC's from the UNCC Writing Project for an Advanced Teacher Research Institute that focused on the idea of Researching Digital Literacies: Finding, Joing, and Negotiating Professional Conversations.

I attended my first UNCCWP events last summer for the summer institute and I've been blown away every since! I love meeting with writers/teachers from all grade levels and this advanced institute did not disappoint.

It would be hard to condense everything that we did in our four days, but I wanted to post a poem I wrote (and have now revised a bit) during some of our writing time. This poem would not exist without the writing project. I'll make a short note as to why after the poem.

H.O.M.A.G.O.

You said homango with no other context
and at first I thought you said imago

which I do know. I wanted to create a juxtaposition
but how to compare when you don’t know

what one of the words means? I try to learn.
From memory - Imago is a step in metamorphosis

but homango doesn’t seem to exist in dictionary.com. Nor
on other websites but due to a typo I realize you meant homago. Oh.

I added the N. Homago, now that is out there. Places for people
to hang out, mess around, and geek out. What quotes

inspire you? What regularly re-energizes you? What
spontaneously bubbles up your passion?

Is it technology? Is it taxidermy?
Collecting unique umbrellas?

What new avenues could you venture down?
I bet you would be surprised at who else

is excited about plotting an x-axis
for their own personal research. You

aren’t the only one with Zoroastrian leanings. You
weren’t the sole individual to achieve

a perfect score on that web based game.
You can’t help but find a collaborator,

a companion in dorkdom
which is exactly

what we all want, right? To find
the other half of our geek soul.

-

I've been working on a series of poems playing off the alphabet in some, but in particular the poetic form the abecedarian. I've worked on quite a few, but found myself stumped with the letter H. I wanted to start the poem with the letter H and then use the other letters of the alphabet to flesh out the poem with each line focusing on one letter of the alphabet until I ended with G.

I just asked the other group of diligently working writers to please give me a word that starts with H. I did not advise why. I was given the wword above, and part of what transpires in the poem was me working out that word.

As I said, If I had not been with this group of writers/teachers this poem would not exist. If I had not taken the time to play with Google, twitter, Facebook etc as I was thinking about this poem it would not be what it is. I took the time to hang out, mess around, and geek out, and, for all of that (and more) I am grateful.