Manifestos: The manifesto has continued to flourish in poetry and art throughout the decades and so deserves its own category here in the study of modern and contemporary poetry. As the different movements in modern and contemporary poetry set out the norms of their movements in manifestos, they set up a school of thought that continued to use their methodologies and further strengthened the hybridization occurring in modern and contemporary poetry. I LOVED the manifestos we read in this class. I'd read many of them before, and I always admired the mix of text and meaning. The manifestos of the surrealist and dada movement (like how to make a dada poem) took into account the new technologies emerging at the time (bookmaking and more). Because I've been exploring what we've been learning through these intricate books, I wanted to get back to the tools that I use to do my work -- notebooks and pens. I always assign my students the task of writing a manifesto. Manifestos are important. I wanted to write a manifesto as the cover of a journal -- and inside the journal I altered a copy of VOGUE magazine. It was a huge undertaking, and I didn't fully finish it. However, the manifesto itself came along nicely. I wanted it to represent my own feelings about writing after reading these writers. Each of the poets we have studied have been incredibly dedicated to their craft. Something I realize is that I have dedicated more time to being a student and a teacher the last decade than to my writing. In a lot of ways, writing this manifesto echoed for me the importance of taking myself seriously as a writer and exploring my work with presence and also with abandon.