#hannah gamble

[geryone]

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, Hannah Gamble

[geryone]

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, Hannah Gamble

[geryone]

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, Hannah Gamble

[a-purple-girl]

↑ written by kids grades 3rd-6th

written by highschoolers ↓

The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too) by Hannah Gamble

[cdnsongbirdme]

Hannah Gamble, "Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree with You 2" from Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (Fence Books, 2012)

[nahhhlina]

excerpted from “The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)” by Hannah Gamble

These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn't been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.

Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.

Anecdote that I hope you'll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]

So let's look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:

Snacking on this and that

my friends and I keep the party going

even when it is over”

"Whispers of a

secret crush being unraveled”

"I’m trapped in this hole that

I can’t break through”

"Barack Obama in the White House.

I can feel the inspiration

Can you feel it?”

"Now I feel secure with my head held high.

Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.

While the average older student's poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer's vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bizarre, yet true.

Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”

The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.

The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

(full text here)

[somehoodratshit]

I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing

[firstfullmoon]

At the Casa Grande disco, men hold on to other men’s behinds, and women hold on to men’s behinds, and everyone is holding on to what it means to be dancing and holding on, and I am there too, doing the two things I am always doing: holding on, and drinking enough water so that tomorrow I’ll be able to document all the things humans do to endear themselves to me, conscious of how the dancing will bring them closer, and them them farther away.

— Hannah Gamble, “Casa Grande”