Make Your Soul Grow

By borkali in Winter Reading 2021 on
9 comments

I lost the last few days of the Feed Your Soul challenge that some of us started the reading session with seeing as there was no power at my house since Tuesday. We got power back on Saturday night! Anyhow, I’m going backwards as I prefer and had to post Kurt V’s short letter here: https://lettersofnote.com/2013/10/28/make-your-soul-grow/

I’m crawling through a few others that I may post in the comments.

I enjoyed the literary diet very much! I didn’t watch any of the films (one day we should have a film/TV watching challenge!) though I did learn a lot from the selections I had the chance to really dig into.

Published by borkali

9 comments on “Make Your Soul Grow”

  1. “Do art and do it for the rest of your lives” Yes. I was thinking about why Vonnegut’s poetry assignment required rhyming. I think maybe to call the students’ attention to the sound of language; it’s not all about the words as we define them. What do you think, Borkali?

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    1. Great question, Teri — I think the “no fair tennis without a net” speaks to Kurt’s scientific cons(training) — a sort of flexible standard operating protocol. Constraints can help push productivity, perhaps — and kids, developmentally, do appreciate rules typically to accomplish anything (that’s my educator brain thinking). I wish I could ask the iguana himself 🙂

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      1. I can see what you’re saying. He left the subject matter wide open, so no formal constraint might be too daunting: how to begin, what is a poem, anyway?

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  2. One cannot read this too many times. I came across this elsewhere recently and promptly sent it to my kids. And just now as I read it, it was like reading it for the first time. Each time I read it, it changes my life. I love that old iguana.

    …to experience becoming… I mean, how cool is that?

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  3. Totally, Teri — gotta give some kind of scaffold to expect an output — especially when no one expected an assignment ! They only wanted his advice, his presence — instead they got a forever document which is pretty cool from my view.

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    1. That said, the output was secondary to the becoming, which could be just staring at the white page and thinking about what to do!

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  4. What fun. I loved the idea of tearing the poem into pieces and “throwing it to the winds.” It reminded me of my adult friend who loved building magnificent sandcastles only to have them swept back out to sea with the incoming tide.

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