While I have many qualms with how inquiry is being pushed and explained differently by everyone I encounter, I did appreciate an excuse to expand my horizons each week. Furthermore, I liked that we had the opportunity to build our inquiries over a full semester and to switch inquiries when we felt our learning journey was complete.
To summarize I learned…
That I hate baking
But Poetry makes me happy. I glad I took the time to read new poets and collections I might not have gotten to.
Surprisingly my biggest takeaway is my obession with AI image generators (specifically Bing image creator) specifically putting in lines of poetry and character descriptions.
Like come on!!!! for someone not artistic getting to see visual representations of my favourite poems and characters is amazing.
For this week I was curious what ChatGPT would recommend as a Poetry Collection based on my interests.
Below is a screencast:
there is a lot of background noise I would recommend muting the video
After I stopped casting I continued prompting it and very quickly is began suggesting poetry collections that did not exist. It very obviously does not have much data on Canadian female poets or poetry collections themed around women’s experiences and injustices. This is a shame as I know there is a lot of content that does exist out there which is found easily through search engines.
the concept is three unnamed young women on a night out partying in a city (in my head, Toronto, where the writer spent 10 years of her life). It brings us forwards and backwards in time throughout the night. It is messy and dark and chaotic perfectly representing a night out in Toronto with two friends.
Th title of the collection is swines and on the cover there are three women diving so I thought it would be interesting to ask Bing Microsoft image Designer AI what it thought swans personified as three young women in a dive bar would look like. What they came up with fits the collection swimmingly.
*note my mom was with me when I was generating using microsoft designer and was shocked that most of the renderings looked like me. This makes her and now me wonder if microsoft somehow knows what I look like. A little strange that 80% of the renderings are brunette girls my age with my skin tone and features.
Honestly this collection as a whole wasn’t a vibe.
I thought I would like it because it was marketed as capturing the mundane and the city (Toronto)
And I love the mundane, lyrical poetry, and Toronto so I was like heck yeah
Except it was too mundane and not enough City so it was meh
disappointing
the lyrical poetry was good though.
It was also marketed as Canadian but it was like not that Canadian. That was a let down.
There was not much of a theme or narrative, which made me realize when reading and writing collections, I prefer strong cohesion through theme or narrative.
My favourite poems were titled ” ” which paralled a woman being flayed with a sunset and ” ” which had the most city vibes and featured a fifteen year old girl crying in the rain.
Here are AI representations of 15 year olds crying in the rain in downtown Toronto. THEY ARE EXACTLY WHAT I IMAGINED!!!!!!!
For this week, I read Joshua Whitehead’s (he/him) poetry collection Full-Metal Indigequeer.
I had read the poem Mihokwaniy in an introductory Canadian Literature course during my undergrad and it has sat with me ever since. Mihokwaniy means rose in Whitehead’s cultural language which is also the name of his grandmother for whom the poem is written. Rose Whitehead . Who is not just a murdered or missing indigenous woman. She is a grandmother. She is “a beauty queen extraordinaire” (see pages 99-104) .
I decided to order the collection as a whole when I embarked on this journey of exploring new (to me) forms, themes, and organization of poetry collections. Of all the collections I have acquired, this one is by far the most unique and experimental in form. I went in knowing it was not similar to my own style of poetry. I am glad I went out of my comfort zone because I really did learn a lot.
The collection is from the point of view of an indigequeer rebel computer virus named ZOA. Zoa creates a continuity in the collection, which is inherently discontinuous in a way for a purpose. It sounds confusing, but it really works, and it’s really beautiful. Most of the collection is incredibly visual in form, which gets across the computer virus angle. Poems are interspersed with computer code and lots and lots of seemingly random numbers. I have opted not to include photos because of copyrights and to support the integrity of the work, but if you are interested come see me!
The video below is a talk Joshua Whitehead did following the collection’s release. It touches on many of the themes of the collections. In the video, he also provides information about his background, including his indigenous nation, his family, and the work and connections he is making in Calgary, where he completed his Ph.D. and continues to work/study. It also highlights the power and poetry Joshua Whitehead’s words have both in their oral and written form.
If you can’t find the collection at a local bookstore here are some links from the publisher (TalonBooks), Indigo, and Amazon.
Welcome to my new inquiry! I will now be delving into poetry specifically looking at form, theme, and structure in different collections. I am currently formatting my old poetry from my teenage years into thematic collection which is my motivation. Since I have the materials and was intending to do this to some degree anyway I think this will be more productive of a project.
Most importantly poetry brings me joy instead of dread (goodbye baking)
This inquiry topic sparked interest naturally last week when I was watching a youtube video essay on InstaPoetry. The video explains it best, but basically the genre is called insta poetry because its produced quickly (instantly), often about an instant event or feeling, and is most often posted on instagram (though is now a hot publishing comodity).
Here is the video embed but it’s long so this link might
The collection I want to focus on this week is Sabrina Benaim’s Depression & Other Magic Tricks. This collection and Sabrina’s work were incredibly influential to me in my teen years but it’s sat dormant on my bookshelf ever since. While most of the poems in the collection predate the peak and plateau of instapoetry, upon rereading it, I would now classify most of it in that genre. It’s strange to think poems that meant so much to me make me cringe now.
Sabrina is/was primarily a spoken-word poet. Something I found interesting was that the poems that were written versions of her spoken word poems packed the same punch for me as they did last decade. It could be that I could hear her voice in my head while reading it, but I like to think that it’s because spoken-word poems like that are the opposite of instant. Her spoken poems were clearly rewritten, rehearsed, and respoken countless times and continue today.
I find it difficult and tedious to transcribe/format spoken word poems but this observation reminds me that the process is worth it.
This is a poem in the collection that I like, almost purely because of the way she says minnows.
I decided to close the low-sugar baking inquiry and start a new one. I’ve come to hate baking, and at this point, I do not have the time or mental energy for something that does not bring me joy.
What I have learned from that inquiry:
I do not like baking.
There are some really cool sugar replacements (icing sugar, brown sugar blends).
It’s really easy to substitution (it doesnt taste as different as I thought.
Stay tuned for next week for the unveiling of my exciting new inquiry topic….
An intermission from the long-awaited brownies, this week I made a festive pumpkin bread with cream cheese frosting using sugar substitutes! The recipe can be found here.
Substitutions: Splenda instead of granulated white sugar (1 : 1 ratio), Swerve Icing sugar substitute instead of powdered sugar (1 : 1 ratio), and Splenda Brown Sugar Blend (1 cup of brown sugar = 1/2 cup of substitute = 1/4 cup brown sugar + 1/4 cup Sucrolose). I used pumpkin pie spice instead of cardamom.
I came out to a good start however I quickly realized I do not have the muscle memory or strength for baking specifc actions such as scraping or folding the dough and holding the mixing bowl at certain angles. My mom kept trying to take over which is. precisely why I don’t have the muscle memory or strength.
When I combined the wet and dry ingredients i starting having regrets. IT WAS SO SO SO Sticky. And it smelled like pumpkin but as in an actual like vegetable pumpkin not a dessert. It was also a nightmare to mix and move.
I finally got it in the pan. It didn’t look very good, being all flat and shallow, but I carved my initials, put it in the oven, and called it a day.
The icing was less finicky but it definitely needed to be mixed longer than we expected.
I had lost hope but suprisingly it came out amazing!
My family could not believe there was only 1/8 cup worth of sugar in it. The after taste only came after about 10 minutes so if you had a drink of milk, water, etc. with it I think it would counteract it.
It was a UNIQUE texture. Quite strange. It is very dense, soft but chewy, kind of a crust. Not really a loaf or a bread. I give it 6 / 10 as a normal dessert and a 8 / 10 for a low-sugar dessert.
*shout out to Andi for showing me how to format my posts using columns
This week I have decided to focus on making brownies with sugar substitutions!
First I went to the grocery store to look for sugar substitution and was really surprised by the selection. They even had a brown sugar and icing sugar substitute that I had never seen or heard of before.
So then it was time to look for a recipe! I decided to capture the process using Screencastify. Honestly I got really annoyed and frustrated by it. But I will say the editing tools were easy to use and I like the end product. It is a resource I would use with my classes. The recipe I chose is from Cakes by MK.
I haven’t actually made the brownies yet, so stay tuned!
For those living with high blood sugar finding low sugar options can be daunting especially when it comes to baked-goods. So for this free inquiry project I would like to explore as many sugar alternatives, substitutions, and low-sugar recipes as I can to find out what works for me and what doesnt. And hopefully provide some helpful information, reflection and recipes for others along the way.
Attributions:
Video by Artem Podrez from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/video/junk-foods-causing-diabetes-6824317/
