Alphabet Blocks: Expanding Conceptions of Language With/in Poetry

Résumé

As a poet and language educator, I invite and encourage writers to take risks in their writing, to engage innovatively with a wide range of genres, to push boundaries in order to explore creatively how language and discourse are never ossified, but always organic; how language use is integrally and inextricably connected to knowledge, identity, subjectivity, and being in the world. I invite writers, whether English is a first language or an additional language, to know themselves in poetry, to know themselves as poets. We live in a contemporary culture that mostly ignores poetry. This is unfortunate because poetry invites alternative ways of knowing and being and becoming. I encourage all writers to write poetry, because poetry is a capacious genre that opens up endless possibilities for expression and communication. In this essay I offer a series of poems about language, discourse, epistemology, and pedagogy. I hope these poems will invite language educators and scholars from diverse perspectives and experiences to consider how writing poetry stimulates the imagination and inspires the heart to ask questions about our lives and the world we live in.