Writing Poetry in English as a Second Language
Poetic Auto Ethnographer: Fang-Yu Liao
Participant: Second Langauge Writer of Poetry
Project: Meaningful literacy in a second language
Source: Liao, F. (2020). When my professor
tells me to write poetry in my second language: A poetic autoethnography. In B.
Yazan, S. Canagarajah,
& R. Jain (Eds.), Autoethnographies
in ELT: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices (pp. 57-74).
Routledge: New York, NY.
I
My heart started to
pounder and wonder...
POETRY?
Really?
You
must be kidding me?
How can I write poetry?
Poetry
like
Shakespeare’s
Sonnet?
or
classic
poems from Chinese poets?
Not even a poet in my first languages.
Never written any poems in Mandarin.
What
should I do?
Can
I survive from this class?
Smile on my face,
to convince myself,
I can do it......
BUT
CAN I?
IV
Closing eyes we all sat,
I felt relaxed and comfortable.
This time,
I neither worried
whether I had to rhyme or use
figurative languages
nor felt
inclined to compare myself as L2
writers with L1 professional poets.
I don’t feel like I need to become
writers like L1.
I don’t feel inferior compared to L1 writers.
I
am myself.
My poems don’t have to be a masterpiece
from others’ point of view.
I am not requesting appreciations from others. It’s
expressing and re-experiencing
my emotional, personal, meaningful
insights
about my own understanding of my life experiences.
I am one of its kind as
an L2 writer.
VII
Closing my eyes,
I
went back to the memory: writing poetry
for
the very first time.
I
use Chinese characters
for
the very first time.
Why did I use Chinese characters?
I didn’t know how to use English
to phonetically spell these words correctly.
I didn’t want to disrupt my writing and thinking
process.
I felt if I do use the English
phonetics instead of Chinese characters,
it lost its beauty and the original meaning of it.
I questioned
the need to translate Chinese into English
for whose convenience?
It doesn’t
represent
my linguistic competence
my writer’s identity
as the agent of my own writing
pieces.
Writing poetry in a second language,
does
not mean
to abandon or downgrade my first
languages.
instead,
I feel proud of my multilingual and multi-cultural resources.
X
First day in class
The instructor asked us
about our interests of creative writing
I was the 8th to speak
about
my
poetry writing experience in a second language
my belief
on values of applying poetry writing to L2 students
There were four more
students
but
the introducing process stopped
The instructor started
to give us a lesson
a
study that examines 25000 student writings
why
some are considered as
“good” writing whereas some are not
divided
into three piles
expressive
(writing for self; 4%)
poetic
(writing for own sake; 9%; problematic term)
transactional
(writing for audience; good writing; 87%)
It implied
ESL
poetry writing plays the poetic function of language
but
IT IS NOT POETRY.
The instructor was
bothered by the term “poetry”
we
use in the field of Applied Linguistics
“Why can’t you come up with new term to
describe it?”
“There are different
concepts of poetry used in different disciplines,
and
what I use is the definition that Hanauer used.”
“Who can define poetry? Who has the right to define poetry?
Even Aristotle didn’t define it.”
“What about terms like
‘ESL poetry’ or ‘EFL haiku’?”
None of the above the
instructor satisfied with . . .
An Indian lady I
assumed,
joined
the conversation.
Looking at me and said:
“You are not on the same page.”
“ESL poetry is not poetry because it’s
ARTIFICIAL
NOT NATURAL.”
”NO!!!!!!!!!!!” I
jumped in and replied.
Nobody was on my side or supported my ideas,
not
even the instructor in the class.
Uncomfortable,
but
I tried to keep smiling and being polite.
When the class time was
over,
I
felt eager to leave the classroom right away.
Literary,
RIGHT AWAY!!!
I can’t stand it for another second to be present in that environment.
I
rushed out silently and alone.
My
mask I put on crushed.
I couldn’t fake it anymore.
