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Quantum Poet Day
Jun. 1st, 2011 04:56 pmI sorted my problem with verbs today, by teaching the relative nature of nouns and verbs and how crucial they are to make operational sentences. Now we can move onto nouns, gracefully. I'll get back to verbs later.
Alliteration was a great deal of fun to teach, as it should be. It proved to be a lovely vehicle for showing people how language and poetry work together. It would have been cooler if I hadn't somehow left half my examples at home, but the first set of poems my class wrote provided exactly the right tools. Actually, it worked better using their own examples ("Could you hear how J has anticipated that there will be a rhyme and that he's adjusted his rhythm to foreshadow that rhyme and how this expectation of rhyme drags the alliteration down?" Yes, they could. Not only could they hear, but they could then write rhymelessly and still poetically. This is a bit of a breakthrough for some of them, as they were taught in school that any batch of words slung together charmingly was poetry. Today they started their reading with an awareness of the underlying feel of the language, and it really, really showed, both in that reading and when they came to writing.
I think my favourite question of the day was about the use of foreign words when writing alliteratively. We discussed acclimatisation and how long it took for a word borrowed from somewhere else to take on the necessary colouration, and we also discussed which languages were more likely to support their poetry and which to undermine. I used French as a language that undermines the beat that I hear in alliterative poetry. Now that I think about it, I don't know if that's French or if that's the way I personally hear French. I know the theory of why the romance languages don't alliterate as strongly as English, but in reality, I want to test this and question. I want to pick up some Baudelaire and see if I am make him boom.
Word of the day was 'classical' and we know now the shape of a wave. We also know the behaviour of a wave when there is nothing to interfere with its formation. This led to an interesting discussion of the relationship of tsunamis with light (the shape of the wave), which, if anyone is still playing along with the quantum physics and poetry thing at home, would be a rather intersting subject for a piece of alliterative verse.
And that was my Wednesday morning.
Alliteration was a great deal of fun to teach, as it should be. It proved to be a lovely vehicle for showing people how language and poetry work together. It would have been cooler if I hadn't somehow left half my examples at home, but the first set of poems my class wrote provided exactly the right tools. Actually, it worked better using their own examples ("Could you hear how J has anticipated that there will be a rhyme and that he's adjusted his rhythm to foreshadow that rhyme and how this expectation of rhyme drags the alliteration down?" Yes, they could. Not only could they hear, but they could then write rhymelessly and still poetically. This is a bit of a breakthrough for some of them, as they were taught in school that any batch of words slung together charmingly was poetry. Today they started their reading with an awareness of the underlying feel of the language, and it really, really showed, both in that reading and when they came to writing.
I think my favourite question of the day was about the use of foreign words when writing alliteratively. We discussed acclimatisation and how long it took for a word borrowed from somewhere else to take on the necessary colouration, and we also discussed which languages were more likely to support their poetry and which to undermine. I used French as a language that undermines the beat that I hear in alliterative poetry. Now that I think about it, I don't know if that's French or if that's the way I personally hear French. I know the theory of why the romance languages don't alliterate as strongly as English, but in reality, I want to test this and question. I want to pick up some Baudelaire and see if I am make him boom.
Word of the day was 'classical' and we know now the shape of a wave. We also know the behaviour of a wave when there is nothing to interfere with its formation. This led to an interesting discussion of the relationship of tsunamis with light (the shape of the wave), which, if anyone is still playing along with the quantum physics and poetry thing at home, would be a rather intersting subject for a piece of alliterative verse.
And that was my Wednesday morning.