structured creativity

Looks like the trinity poster is striking again!  Perfect timing to be kicking off the first day of my February break too.  After watching some TED talks and reading some posts about schools killing creativity I remembered a poem and had written last year after an educational psychology class.  Basically it was based about some ideas put forth by Whitehead and my own experiences related to this ideas in my own ventures in my photography and writing and while they started off purely instinctual with the help of some structure I was able to raise the creativity to a whole new level!

Whitehead’s Theory

for Darren, Baylee and Lauren

Trading free time

    for time tables

and passion

for precsion

sometimes it takes

structured instruction

to expand beyond

instinctive creativity

It's a book alright...

One thing I am surprised I never got around to blogging here is the fact that I did indeed collect some of my favourite poems and self published them as a book - Bits from the Boldt - which can be found here: Bits from the Boldt by Jeff Burton.

It was a pretty fun process and ended up getting a lot more attention then I had expected.  The local paper did an interview with me, I also had an interview with On Campus News from the University of Saskatchewan (I look terrible in the picture) and was asked to be part of the Pelican Bay Arts Collective arts festival as one of three authors in an event.  This last one was amazing; not only was it my first public reading, it also served as a launch for the book and I got to read alongside a writer who inspires me and helped me in my writing process - Allan Safarik who had some amazingly wonderful things to say about me.  Add to all of this the fact that people actually bought copies of my book!  I really made the book more as a personal thing to have a collected book of my poems on my shelf but the fact that other people actually were willing to pay for it as well blew my mind!

So here we are a few years later and I have another book brewing.  I am planning it to be released alongside a showing of my photography in the local museum later this year.  This blog post came out of the fact that I have been looking at my stuff to start organizing this new book and figured it was as good a reason to post as any lol!

This is the cover for my new book coming out later this year!

Oh yea...on the geek side of my life - Toy Fair is only days away!! SO excited to see whats being pitched for Minimates!

From the ashes

Wow, I have not posted here in a long time and oddly enough was not sure I ever would again.  Not that I don't want to but just I am pretty busy with life - school, family, hobbies and all that.  But inspiration has been building and coming form odd and unusual places.  One big part is that fact that I now have 2 other blogs on the go - one devoted to Minimates (which has been going for 399 days consecutively as of today) and then my teacher blog.  So did I really need to resurrect my first blog and make it a trio?  Well things in my life seem to run in threes (triplets I swear) so it really only makes sense to bring it back.  This will be the home of thoughts and ideas that just don't fit those other two blogs as well as, of course, poetry.  Enjoy!

Inspiration

It started in the littlest toe

and slowly sweeps

into the others

rolling through the

foot and up the legs

gaining speed

and intensity

as it steamrolls

through the abdomen

it thunders across

the heart

and rockets up the arms

until the fireball

of brilliance

collides with the mind

unleashing a magical torrent

of ideas