Let’s take a moment to say something out loud:
there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world;
and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons
many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent
lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows
of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper
or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not
important enough to take the time to craft.
Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to:
Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics
are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find
a rhyme, if they know that one is coming:
(you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last
word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?)
(If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend).
When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms
and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited
memory to do the work of storytelling,
passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas–
you might start to wonder which skills we should be
focusing on, when passing information
along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it,
and with confidence can say what I’m going
to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most
of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent;
for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm
was just the way they knew their brain would remember it;
and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen,
you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow;
the calming force of human expectation,
and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again,
like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders,
that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount
of time. (who has time for that, these days?)