What does it mean to me to be a compositionist? It seemed like a term that could include more than it often has, that is, it could describe another conversation I participated in before graduate school with composers and performance artists about how to compose methods of composing, and how to understand understanding through making (that’s a wonky sentence; read it again). I appreciate that multimodal composition is getting recognition and exploration, because it puts emphasis on composing rather than writing. I even suspect that the distance gained by discussing writing as a mode of composition could make it easier for some students to think rhetorically about writing and develop the metacognitive awareness they need to be more effective composers. We’ll see. I’m still new and unresearched about all this after having applied to study poetry as a way of thinking about things in the world.
