[Stylist] Concrete poetry

[Barbara HAMMEL]

Wow! The daughter of a good friend of mine is studying to be an education major. This young lady also happens to be a blind person. She called me up the other night, being, as she said "the resident poetry expert" because she is taking children's lit. right now and her assignment was to write a poem in the form she was learning about. She said, "Why couldn't I have picked sonnets or haikings? But no. I just read two books of concrete poems. Have you ever seen concrete poems in Braille?" I told her that I had not see many because most transcribers just write out the lines and make a note that the poem was in thus or such formation. Well, she was determined to write a concrete poem in Braille. She  to worry because, while she had not subjected this particular teacher to a Braille assignment yet, she had done it to other ones in the last two years. We spent two hours on the phone Friday, taking couplets that she had written about time and worked them into an hourglass shepe. (Double the fun because she has a rhyming poem with lines that don't rhyme that fit the form she wanted.) Well, today I finished my own hourglass poem. That was a fun little challenge. While she ended up with a few lines that did not fit perfectly by lining up right at both ends, mine does. I wish I had not deleted hers after helping her with it and kept it for my other people's folder.  Oh, and by the way, I reworked a few lines in FISH EYES and like it a bit better. LOL! No one has even been curious as to why the name when it has nothing to do with the poem.  Barbara Hammel