This:
my name is Boat
— Katy / krfabian (@krfabian) March 24, 2021
and wen im tired
(but shipping werk
is still required)
then all I want
is lyttle snooze
i turn to side
i blok the Sooz
In case you are not familiar with the Bredlik form, here is an explanation. And here is more. Also, in case you've been living in a cave, the internets have lost their mind over the boat in the Suez Canal.
I am thinking of making my intro to creative writing students write one of these poems. We're in the poetry half of the semester, I'm focusing on form, and this is a new form which likely would not have happened without internet, so it seems perfect.
On the other hand, they get so upset whenever something isn't written in Standard English. Some of them literally can't read anything that plays with language this way -- at least, they say they can't ("I couldn't understand it! It took me an hour to read the first paragraph!") and I've begin to stop doubting it.
I gave them "The Semplica Girl Diaries" to read a few weeks ago (when we were still doing fiction) and they were destroyed. (Not because they liked it, or found it devastating: because they literally could not read it.)
5 comments:
I love "The Semplica Girl Diaries"! But my students would rebel. This semester I finally gave up on trying to get my American Lit students to read a Charles Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" because they refuse to attempt the sections in dialect, and then they miss the satire entirely. Frustrating.
I used to assign some of the slave narratives collected by the WPA in my World Lit class, but yes, exactly, students wouldn't read them -- or at least claimed they "couldn't" read them.
I always suspected some latent racism there, given that most of them spoke dialects nearly identical to that used in the narratives.
I think all those poems are hilarious! It's also pretty hilarious that a giant container ship stuck itself in a sand and stone wall for days.
Thanks for linking "The Semplica-Girl Diaries"! It has a "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" vibe.
It does!
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