Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish, Latin American & Latino Literature.

Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish, Latin American & Latino Literature Edited by Julio Marzan New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1997 ISBN: 0-915924-52-8 248pp. $14.95 (paper)

In the early seventies, when I was invited to work in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in Pennsylvania, two sources of ideas and inspiration were provided to us beginners -- a publication by The Teachers & Writers Collaborative (called, I believe, The Whole Word Catalog) and Kenneth Koch's book Wishes, Lies and Dreams. Relying heavily on ideas I gleaned from these resources, I ventured into elementary classrooms for the first time. I was already a poet, with my own passion for words and images, but I had never tried working with children, and these books were like training wheels, giving me the confidence to pedal into new territory. Soon I had begun learning from the children, their feelings, their hopes and personal priorities, their enthusiasm for language and creation, and from the strength of poetry itself. Over time I found my own balance and was able to leave the training wheels behind. During the next decade in Pennsylvania and then in Ohio, I tried the poetry of many poets and invented many exercises for budding poets from kindergarten through high school, in small rural towns and major urban centers, always working in my native (and only) language, English.

Luna, Luna is a new publication by The Teachers and Writers Collaborative that expands language horizons in a way more suitable to the multi-cultural reality of today. It is designed to help teachers and writers bring the powerful literary heritage of the Spanish-speaking world into American classrooms, bi-lingual or otherwise. This book, with its 19 essays by experienced writer/teachers, provides a new set of training wheels. Though it seems obvious that a Spanish-speaking poet or teacher would do better introducing the work of Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, Mistral and others than an English speaker, and many of the essays emphasize bi-lingual presentation, anyone who has Spanish-speaking students can use the tips provided here to give those students a place in sharing their language and literature with the rest of the class. This book would be useful, whether extra balance is needed as an introduction to the poetry and language of another culture (as for me) or as an introduction to the sharing of poetry reading and writing in the classroom.

The essays are varied, some focusing on work with elementary school students, some middle or high school or college students, one "Inspiring Young Writers with Chicano Pinto Poetry," by Mary Sue Galindo, with adolescent males at a community center in an economically depressed area of South Texas (a most difficult population to inspire with poetry). In most cases the writer details her or his own experience with students, gives both the Spanish and English versions of the poems used for inspiration, and offers examples of poetry written by the students in response to the exercise or writing project. Though the book's title suggests a variety of writing experiences, in all but one essay (in which Sandra Cisneros's novel House on Mango Street is used to get students writing prose vignettes -- a project extended over 6 weeks of daily English classes) it is poetry that is central.

The essays differ in complexity and originality. Two are by Kenneth Koch (one in collaboration with Kate Farrell) and are reminiscent of Wishes, Lies and Dreams in their precise, almost workbook-like use of form and structure, and Koch's apparent preference for the surreal, perhaps as a spur to student's willingness to move beyond the logical thought demanded in the typical classroom. The literature used as examples varies from odes to question poems, to calligrams (poems whose typography and shape on the page create visuals to enhance their meaning), to prose vignettes to gregueria ("a kind of aphoristic prose poem"). An example of this last, by one of Spain's most beloved poets, Ramon Gomez de la Sema, led to the student examples that follow it here:

Un pie levanta la colcha del mar: es un delfin.

A foot lifts the bedspread of the sea: it's a dolphin. (p. 172)

The W is a dash that crashed head-on into a wall.

The f is the t checking to see if its shoes are tied.

--Bradley Pitts (p. 174)

For a teacher or writer wishing to adapt any of the exercises in this book, it is useful to have both the work of the masters and the work of students who have taken the ideas or images in their own, unique directions. For those with limited acquaintance with Hispanic literature, there is a collection of other poems to use as models for student writing in the back of the book. There is also a section titled "Bibliography and Other Resources" and "Notes on Contributors" so that the reader can become acquainted with the authors of the essays.

All too often in our schools the special programming available to gifted students focuses exclusively on rational/linear, cognitive and analytical skills. During my years with the Poets in the Schools program, I often had the hardest time with classes of gifted or academically talented students who had become addicted to good grades and were unfamiliar with and frightened of the risky territory of the creative process. As a gifted student who was also passionately creative, I myself struggled through my academic career to keep my imagination alive under the burden of intellectual expectation. This book was not designed for gifted classrooms. That is all the more reason why it should be used there!

In a particularly strong essay, "The Flowered Song, Learning from Aztec & Mexican Poetry," John Oliver Simon gives us one understanding of the importance of poetry: "In order to create this palabra florida [flowered word], we must employ the imagination: that faculty within us that makes images, makes pictures, fantasizes, and travels beyond the confines of logic and the classroom. In poetry, we play with words, as if words were as light as petals and feathers, as if what we say has as much meaning as the songs of birds." (p. 109)

This book should be part of any school's library of material for those who would nourish the minds of their gifted students, bi-lingual or otherwise. Without a well-nourished imagination, our gifted children go out into the world deprived in fundamental ways too few people fully understand.

It is not only the contributions of another culture, or metaphor, or precise language, or literary analysis that students learn in such an exercise.

Reviewd by Stephanie Tolan, poet, playwright and novelist as well as a consultant on the needs of highly gifted children and a Contributing Editor of the Roeper Review.