Tonight local poet and reader in residence Jen Hadfield
visited my intermediate class. We looked at riddle like poems, such as A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig
Raine.
It was fascinating to watch the reactions of the learners in
reading these poems and grapple with vocabulary several notches above what they
would come across in their course book. It was also refreshing to watch them
work with someone whose personality is so different from my own: a person less
afraid of silences than I am. At times,
Jen would ask a question, and, just as I was beginning to find the wait excruciating
a learner would pipe up with a considered response.
Unfortunately we didn’t have time to ask the learners to
work on their own riddle poems: this can wait till next week! And I am still
keen to run a poetry translation workshop. As they say: watch this space…
