Hearing Language: The Assonance, Consonance, And Onomatopoeia

By Author: Tracy McGrady
Total Articles: 55
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During the third week of school, Mr. Krantzman shows Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cage, 1961) to 13-year-old Sofia, saying that he wonders if she might find interesting the way that voice and breath are represented on a page. Mr. Krantzman has told his students that he wants them to read deeply—matters of voice and breath as represented in literature, especially poetry, are content to be learned throughout the year.

As a frequent visitor to Mr. Krantzman's classroom in the role of researcher, I have come to realize that engaging students in the study of poetry as readers, writers, and performers is not a unit of study but rather a yearlong immersion that begins with texts he offers to each student and that is sustained through engagements that are woven through the year as it unfolds. During the school year, it is likely that he will place poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, e.e. cummings, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Molly Peacock, Gary Snyder, Sekou Sundiata, and William Carlos Williams—to name but a few—into students' hands. Likely, he will ...
... receive poems from students that they offer as important art. In helping students to shape poetry, he will teach them to name the poetic—such as repetition, rhythm, meter, and figurative language—in other types of print and non-print texts, as this is a classroom where the idea of genre is purposely blurred. Students' success as Cheap Shoes poets rests not only in the direct poetry instruction Mr. Krantzman provides, but also in the way he guides students to seek and name the poetic across multiple types of texts. For example, Mr. Krantzman and his students study essays by Wendell Berry, Bill Bryson, Annie Dillard, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Barry Lopez in an effort to better understand how these essayists compose. Students will use techniques such as found poetry (Dunning & Stafford, 1992) and sketch-to-stretch (Harste, Short, & Burke, 1988) as ways to deepen their comprehension and understanding of a writer's craft. "I want students to take the reading strategies they employ while reading fiction, such as imaging, and use it to help them make sense of essay," Mr. Krantzman explains, emphasizing the reusable nature of things learned.
By January, students will have read Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie, 1991) and closely studied aspects of the writer's craft that are based on Prose's (2006) work (see Figure 1 for a description of the assignment). Mr. Krantzman explains, "Students are amazed at Rushdie's control as a writer and his use of language. I don't know that they would have been able to read Rushdie with their ears without the immersion into poetry. It all starts there, learning to hear."

In discussing his students' understanding of craft, Mr. Krantzman remarks that one student, Peter, while discussing revisions to an essay he was writing, explained that there's "regular sentences and language and then there's Rushdie sentences and language." Peter was revising word choice and syntax to develop more voice as he had seen done in Haroun. The power in Mr. Krantzman's instruction is that like him, his students begin to cobble together bits of what they have learned here and there and apply these ideas to new situations. This process Discount Shoes of shaping individual students' reading is one the teacher develops alongside his students as he comes to know them, their interests, and their reading behaviors. It is a practice Mr. Krantzman says he considers essential. He later explains that he has offered the Cage text to Sofia because he knows her to be an accomplished violinist. When we discuss Sofia several months later, he tells me that he has noticed that while she and her classmates are involved in conversation, she often moves her fingers on the table in front of her as if that surface might be a substitute for the fingerboard of her violin. "I wonder if she is composing or rehearsing music," says Mr. Krantzman.