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Carolyn Marie Souaid - Author - 2006

Some Living Words

"When I was a student, I hated poetry." Thus began Carolyn Marie Souaid's explanation about her journey to becoming the author of four volumes of poetry which include Snow Formations, a fictionalized account of a young teacher working with the Inuit of the Ungava Peninsula, and her latest, Satie's Sad Piano, a plunge back through the memories of a woman who had been much younger when Trudeaumania was at its height.

Ms. Souaid explained that despite her not doing well on exams which demanded the dissection of poems to the point of their being unrecognizable, she went home from school and wrote reams of poems as her way of dealing with a world which was uncomfortable for her.

She then requested the students make a list which had to contain the following items: a colour, a fruit, a job or profession, an animal, the name of a city, and, lastly, an ingredient that could be found in a pizza.

Everyone rummaged around to find the required words. She drew near-panicked looks when she asked that everyone have a good look at his or her shoes. Dutifully complying, but still puzzled, they were astonished when they were asked to write a description of their shoes in which all of the words on the list were to appear. The order in which they were used was not important, but they all needed to be there. The panic level was heightened when she said, "You have five minutes!" Racing against the clock, everyone penned descriptions using what they thought were improbable items.

In the read-around which followed, the resulting descriptions were surprising. Among those which were read was this one:

After the readings, she suggested that the authors consider where they would break the lines, and how the words would be set on the page. The descriptions now did not only sound like poems, they looked like them too.

With the students a little less tense about writing, and somewhat shocked that what they had produced were actually poems, another task demanded that they play with words in a more risk-taking manner.

Ms. Souaid gave each student two poems, one written in Spanish, the other, written in Italian. Their job was to choose the one written in the language with which they were less familiar, and do a homophonic translation. They had to read the poem as if it had been written using the English sound-system, and then "translate" the sounds into the nearest approximation of words in English. They were not allowed to do a translation of the meaning. This produced some hilarious and often esoteric-sounding verses which sometimes bordered on profundity.

"Desdichas del mes de Enero cuando el indiferente mediodia establece su ecuacion en el cielo" became "Desdemona and Del made a mess while making dinner. Indifferent to the media and the stables involved in the equation, the cello and …"

What these students learned was that poetry is not the dissection of a long-deceased entity to discover the cause of its demise. Instead, they learned to play with the words of a living language, and to explore the pleasures of the poetry that hides in every single thing.

Kevin Wright - Chambly Academy

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