May 17 – Week 2

This week, we continued to develop our group zine, then we took a break and went downstairs to visit the Panorama. The Panorama was built in 1964 for the World’s Fair and is a model of all of New York City to scale (1:100) it was updated in 1992 so there are some buildings on the panorama, like the World Trade Center’s twin towers, that are no longer there. There are a lot of new buildings that are not represented on the map, this can especially be seen in heavily developed neighborhoods like Long Island City, downtown Brooklyn and midtown Manhattan. We spoke about the geography of the city, the population density of the boroughs, different parks and green spaces as well as NYC’s two Airports JFK and LaGuardia.

We came back to the classroom and discussed different types of writing. Creative writing, like poetry, is another great way to learn English without the pressure of having each sentence “perfect” I read the Spanish language poem Tonight I Write by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. We then went around the room reading lines from the English translation in order to practice pronunciation and public speaking.

In the last part of class we learned how to make a one page zine, a librito. Next class I hope that we can make some found poetry zines. Found poetry is when you cut out words or phrases from a book or magazine and use them to create your own writing or poem. Found poetry is supposed to be an intuitive and immediate way to make art with words using collage. I look forward to introducing this process in our next class.