Pure Poetry

Ramen
Tastes good.
Chaashuu, Miso, Tonkotsu,
I love them all.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yamagata
Mountains, people,
Snow and sweat.
Did I live here?
Nda.

Japanese
Itchy knees
One two threes
I still don't understand!
Moozooi.

Orang-utan;
Big, orange,
A lot of fun.
But why so hairy?
Thinking.

Run the four poems I came up with in the 3rd grade classes yesterday and today.

It's fun translating what the kids want to write. One kid wrote about steak and finished his poem with the word 'MEATGOD'. Another wrote about morning, a new day starts and ended it 'Good Morning', the quintessential English class refrain, which I thought was really quite clever.

The atmosphere is completely different in class. All of the kids rise to the challenge of expressing themselves in a foreign language and they're proud of what they've created when they're done.

For something as fluid as poetry, it's funny to see how the textbook goes about encouraging it, and how effectively teachers are invited to stamp the life out of it. Poems must begin with one word and follow from there and there are assigned topics for each line. Rules are set and where so much poetry thrives on undoing such fastenings, Japanese-English-Junior-High-Poetry does not belong.

I read in a book of one case noted by one Teruhisa Horio a while back 'in which the Ministry of Education failed to approve a well-respected work of literature because it did not use the official onomatopoeic word for a river's sound; "We can only conclude from this that the Ministry's inspectors feared that the children might get the idea that it was all right to play with the national language in ways which would encourage them to think of it as something belonging to them rather than as something whose use is controlled by the State for them"'.

Perish the thought they might consider what they've learnt of English as anything belonging them either.