Our school has two special visitors this week: Christine Hume (Juna's mother), and the Canadian poet Christian Bök.Monday
Today, Christine came into our room during our usual math session and gave the children an introduction to the sorts of constraint poetry Christian Bök uses in his writing. We looked at two univocalic poems (each of which uses only one vowel or pair of vowels throughout): "Ants and Aardvarks" and "Fireflies, Spiders, Crickets". The children then got to write univocalic poems of their own using the letter "i" (some of which were read to the class)! Christine also played a recording for us of Christian performing a sound poem: a poem containing no words at all, but only evocative sounds. The rhythms of that performance were so compelling that some of the children got up and started dancing! After Christine went on to the next class, we wrote a sound poem of our own together, and the children even thought of including elements that would be impossible in a solo performance; the final line is split so that one half of the group makes one sound, and the other utters two sounds in sequence. Our sound poem is entitled "The Snake, the President, and the Dodo Bird":
ptc rrr hhh
stoorB eeeeeeee
_______ whistle
ffffffffffffffff rrrps—hhhh
I had a wonderful time being around children who delight in intrepid explorations of language! In our culture the fascinations with secret codes, rhyming, cryptography, punning, spoonerisms and language games of all kinds tends to wane with puberty (thus we often consider these activities childish), but I hope that SK students will develop, as they do, its full potential as a very valuable counterweight to the hypnotic power of linear verbal communication. Or as Dr. Seuss says "On beyond Zebra!" Thanks to Renata's class for being so inspiring and inspired! Christine
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