I had been in contact with Gary Glazner for some time before beginning my Churchill Travelling fellowship with regards to programs and observations so i was very excited to see what they were all about!!
Today i met Gary at 80th Street Residence in Manhattan which is a specific Memory Loss residence. Their was a group of 12/14 participants, mainly women with variety of backgrounds and personal needs and abilities. We sat in a large circle in one of the living room areas and began discussing Shakespeare in honour of England (honour of me!!). As Gary has been working with this group for around 2 years, monthly - the group is confident and engaged straight away. They honestly say how they feel about varios poets, one lady quoted 'Shakespeare is boring and it reminds me of been at school!!'. But this humoured the whole group....
We spoke about numerous poets - Gary reading them all the way through and also 'Call and Response' activities, concluding in writing our own poem based on the theme of 'Fall'. Each member of the group answered Gary's questions based on the senses to come up with their own line for the poem. (This poem will be updated onto the blog very soon - so keep watching out for it!!)...
I had the job of writing everyones comments / lines for the poem during the discussion which was actually very difficult. At the beginning i picked up on the most important phrases but towards the end i wrote down full sentences. It shows that i listened more carefully to the participants towards the end of the session - providing more emotion to the poem through full sentencing. This was very interesting to me - that i need to develop and pick up on all of the words during poetry instead of descriptive words. Hopefully i will be able to try out this technique again tomorrow in another program....
