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Rick AgranLiteraryArts   |
arts statement:I teach writing to Bachelor of Fine Art candidates at art schools and it helps me think metaphorically about new ways of teaching across curriculums, about the relationships between languages, images and literatures. The effective writer has many of the skills of the painter, sculptor, or photographer. Clarity of vision, careful composition, playful experimentation and risk-taking, and an understanding of potential audiences are all equally important in writing and art-making. These concepts all serve the metaphor of writing as art-making and art-making as sense-making (literal and figurative).I enjoy exploring the genesis of all manner of texts (poems, literature, creative non-fiction, researched essays) with students and I teach writing as a reflective process of multiple drafts. Early on I encourage exploration and experimentation with ideas in their germinal state. Identifying the limits of the material and medium are an early part of the process. Wrong tools? Wrong colors? Try something new, or a different way of working with the idea, another vantage point or point of view. Mid-process involves both personal and academic research, relevant personal reflection, and auditioning work for audiences. Want to promote intense scrutiny and reflection? Write (or paint) small, in the less-is-more traditions of haiku or impressionism. Want to overwhelm or inform an audience emotionally? Create huge sprawling collages of vibrant colors, juxtapositions, warring ideas, complex essays. Art needs an audience (as does writing) and the artists as writer's goal is to reach, inform, soothe, and/or provoke an audience. Therefore, my desired classroom culture is interactive, a community of readers and writers endeavoring to assist one another in fully exploring and communicating ideas through their own writing, reading literature and scholarly discourse, and writing about their experiences as appreciaters, creators, and interpreters of texts. I believe in connected teaching and hold face to face conferences with all my students every semester, even in institutions where this has not been required. I take my roles as collaborator and facilitator of learning seriously. I model being meaningfully involved in a community of learners. This one-on-one approach continues to yield great satisfaction for my students and me. My most successful learning and teaching experiences revolve around open, honest relationships between teachers, students, and peers. I am able to articulate clearly a course's or project's expectations, goals, and rewards. In collaboration with students, I seek a unification of purpose on the part of student and teacher and encourage students to develop individual learning projects and personalized goals. I choose texts and carefully develop and orchestrate curricula that empowers learners to explore the process of learning. I also teach students the effective facilitation of discussion to foster partnership and cooperation between peers. I ask students to enter into a full value contract with each other by explicitly asking them to agree to fully value their own ideas and learning, and the ideas and learning of their classmates. biography/history:Rick Agran is a native of Brookline, New Hampshire, and now lives on the edge of the White Mountains. Interested in the intersections between image-making in art and poetry, he has taught artists to write at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the University of New Hampshire, Heartwood College of Art in Kennebunk, Maine, and the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where he now teaches artists to write and is Chair of Liberal Arts.Rick Agran is on the Arts in Education roster for the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts as a Poet in the Schools and also leads book discussions as a scholar for the New Hampshire Humanities Council. Rick has authored two books: a picture book for children called Pumpkin Shivaree (Handprint Books, 2003) and a collection of poems entitled Crow Milk (Oyster River Press, 1997). Poems from Crow Milk have been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac on National Public Radio. Rick also co-edited Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets. His poems have appeared in Centripetal, Cimarron Review, Northern New England Review, Lowell Review, and other magazines. Rick is anthologized in Dirt: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Literature (Dirt Press), Portsmouth Unabridged: New Poems for an Old City (Peter Randall Press) and American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press). He is at work on a second collection of poems tentatively entitled A Short History of Longing. Rick Agran earned an MA in English from UNH, where he studied with Mekeel McBride and Charles Simic. He also received an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with Mark Doty, Kate Johnson-Phillips, Thomas Lux, and Marie Howe. activities/services:Rick Agran has been Poet in the Schools for over twelve years. For the last six years he has been involved primarily through the Arts in Education Program of the NH State Council on the Arts. He has presented poetry readings, residencies from a day to a month, teacher in-service talks, classroom presentations, organized young author nights, collaborated with musicians, sculptors, and other fine artists to bring engaging programming to both urban and rural schools.Rick likes, most specifically, to develop custom residencies which dovetail with current curriculum and add an additional modality to the learning experiences of both teachers and students. Residencies that culminate in publication, art shows, assemblies, and parents' nights have been particularly rewarding for the schools and communities within which he has worked. Empowering teachers to use poetry in unconventional ways in science, social studies, language arts, outdoor education and experiential challenges, and the fine arts classrooms (art and music) is most rewarding and he enjoys working with teachers to build and bring sensible relevant poetry and writing experiences to the classroom. In addition to poetry, Rick's educational background includes photography and film-making, sculpture, jewelry and metalsmithing, sociolinguistics, and radio production. He grew up in an interracial family in NH and was raised by a single mom and so is attuned to issues of social justice and multicultural affairs. He also worked for the Society for the Preservation of NE Antiquities and Otter Lake Conservation School so is versed in a great deal of NH natural and cultural history. contact:address PO Box 245, Plymouth, NH 03264 phone 603-536-9050
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