Connect The Dots 06

			Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala rasulillah Assalamu alaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu.
Brothers and sisters, this is brother Buddha, Mohammed. And I'm your host on this creative journey
of connected dots where we're learning about effective communication from the Quran and Sunnah. And
from my own experience as a professional poet, you know, I happen to speak fast, I'm just realizing
this now, as I was doing my intro, that sometimes I speak very quickly. And this can be a detriment
to somebody who perhaps is not as fluent in English, maybe English is their second or third
language, it's sometimes difficult for them to keep a flow what I'm trying to say. So I do apologize
		

			if anybody's watching this video, and I am speaking too fast, but I am hopefully inshallah trying to
get everything out of my head, because there's so many things in here, and I want to get them in
there. So in sha Allah, you won't be upset. Now we're going to talk about something very important.
Now we're actually going to talk about writing poetry. So far, I don't even think we've spoken about
putting the pen to the pack. Now we're going to talk about putting the pin on the pad, or in this
day and age literally just popping up Microsoft Word because I don't even write on paper anymore.
But one of the things that I always teach, and is very important, the two most important parts of
		

			your poem, really the only parts anybody actually cares about is the beginning. And the end.
		

			That's it, you, if you take that point home, you have literally mastered everything I've learned
over the last 10 years, okay? People only really pay attention to the beginning, and the ending of
what it is you say. So it's so important to have a strong beginning, have a beginning that will
capture someone's attention right off the bat, you have about, I would say less than 30 seconds to
immediately make a positive impression. This is now we're talking about the future of life, you meet
somebody, as soon as you meet them, you only have a little bit of time for them to have a positive
impression of you as in their first impression. Of course, you might be a great person. But if
		

			you're not able to sell them on that first, boom, you know, you come out the gate swinging, then
unfortunately, everything you say after that, they'll just tune out, it'll just go to the back of
their heads, they'll just start looking for an excuse to get on their phone and start texting or
typing. So you need to, in the first few lines of your poem, automatically capture your audience's
attention. How do you do this? A lot of ways First, you can start off with a joke. That's a great
way of starting off any presentation. You know, this appeals By the way, this is this is not just
for spoken word poetry, we're talking about just public speaking in general, right, you can start
		

			off with a joke, start off with a story, start off with a powerful statement, a powerful quotation.
Now there's so many things, check out the book that I wrote a whole bunch of them inside that PDF.
But there are a lot of things you can do to start off strong, but you have to, in your writing,
think about these two areas, the beginning and the end. And the ending, I would even argue, perhaps,
might be a little bit more important, because that's what people are going to be leaving with. The
last thing you say, is automatically the emotion that they will remember once they actually
experience your writing. So these two places beginning and ending and the ending for me, it's it's
		

			so important, because like I said, it's the thing that people walk away with. It's also the last
opportunity you have to impart upon your argument. Remember, we said, writing a poem is like a like
an essay and your thesis, you need to bang it home to the very end where people are walking away
thinking, wow, I agree with that person. And a good poem, a sign of a good poem, is that your
audience should know that it's the ending, it should be dramatic enough, there should be enough kind
of, you know, build up so that once you end people are like, yeah, it's over. I know, it's over up
to why I tell you this, because there's a lot of poets and some poetry out there, which awkwardly
		

			just stops.
		

			Like that, right? You just like you didn't know I was done, right? You just figured I could keep
going. But there are poets who will write a poem, and they will just have the weirdest way of
ending. It's so much so that the audience will just sit there and they're not sure. Should they
clap? Should they go to the washroom? Should they? Did you forget your line? Should they encourage
you? Right? So your ending should be powerful enough that people know automatically man, that was a
strong ending, and wow, they captured my attention in the very beginning. This poem is solid, what
you said in the middle, who really cares, nobody's paying attention. I mean, they are paying
		

			attention, but not as much as you think this is. Now Honestly, I'm telling you, from my experience,
most people cannot even remember half the lines I say in the middle, but the beginning, they
remember the ending they remember. So go with that beginning and end inshallah, another tactic you
can employ is thinking about creative ways of saying otherwise non creative things. So you might,
for instance, in your poem, there might be a line or reference to the fact that you were looking out
the window, and you could write in your poem, I was looking out the window, or he or she was looking
out the window, right. Or you could flip it up.
		

			slipping down. And you could say, I realized through my eyes the surprise, the gaze of the windows
taught me and not that I don't know, whatever right that was on top of my dome, you see, I'm wrong.
So you could employ any type of creative language, any type of creative thought to say otherwise
uninteresting things in an interesting way. This is part of the power of creative license is you're
not restricted by particular sets of grammatical or language rules, you can really venture outside
of that. And really try your best to be creative to the extent where your audience is not only being
educated, but they're also being entertained. Entertainment in this particular field is a huge
		

			component, right? That's part of the reason why we do a lot of things when we write, we write, and
we, I'll get to that later. But there's a lot of grammatical tools and structures that we do use,
because we want it to be entertaining and fun as well. So not being restricted and thinking about
interesting ways of saying things will only increase or heighten your ability to capture your
audience's attention in childhood. You know, one of the things that I find is very depressing is
that in English language in the curriculum as how we teach it today, children themselves do not know
how to free right, how to just be creative off the top of their dome, I've done this exercise in
		

			schools before I'll tell kids, all right, kids, write about anything you want. And when you tell a
group of like, you know, 16 year olds to write anything they want, they have been conditioned, so
much so that they do not even know how to just write anything they want, they'll ask you for a rule,
should it be like this, just about talking about this doesn't have to rhyme does it have to have
this particular structure, you told them no, just write whatever you want, you know, write as long
or short or whatever. And it's, it's actually a skill set. But I would say it's more of a blessing
to be able to just express yourself, do just say whatever you want to say, when I started writing
		

			poetry, it was more about therapy than anything else, it was really a tool that I was using to help
get over my own problems, you know, I would be going through things in my own life. And I knew that
if I wrote it down, if I was able to put my thoughts down on paper, I'd be able to work through it a
little bit better. And at the same time, I could, you know, reflect on it and think about it, and,
and even be able to, you know, say things, I couldn't tell other people and I knew that on paypal
wasn't gonna judge me, I knew that my pen wasn't gonna say anything about me, they weren't gonna,
you know, gonna talk behind my back. And so it was a tool for me to really get things off my chest.
		

			But today I find like that creative muscle. Really, that's what it is, is a muscle you have to
continually keep using it. For many of us. It's never been exercised properly enough that we have
really shabby creative skills. So you know, don't stick to a structure be free. That's what I'm
teaching, particularly in this genre and this particular style of spoken word poetry. There are no
rules, no regulations, other than just be awesome, be amazing and Shaolin if that's the case. You
have no problems. That's it for this video in sha Allah. Stay tuned for another connected dots for
watching us today. Monica Rahmatullahi wa I can't see