Trudging through words, finding beauty.

Way back when Em was 11, she was given a book called 'Rain May and Captain Daniel' by Catherine Bateson, to read at school, which I also read and enjoyed.  5 years later I only remember snippets of the story.  It was very real book which told the story of a 12 year old girl coping with her parents' divorce.  Living with her mother, one of the ways she shared her deepest thoughts, was through the restricted language of fridge poetry.  I hadn't heard of fridge poetry before and the concept stayed with me as something I'd like to have hanging around on my fridge.

Apparently fridge poetry is passe now (though I don't know anyone who actually owned it), however on our trip to Sydney back in April, we went to a fantastic games store that had every game you could possibly want and then some.  We left with a new Scrabble set and Magnetic  Poetry. (Our house is party central - not!)

Apart from giving my fridge a new look, as I had to remove the collection of school notes and what nots that accumulate under fridge magnets, fridge poetry has been the source of much laughter and discussion.  Here's a selection of what we've written:

Frantic storm gone
Music floods the garden

Black does not leave with the rain

There be useless drunks on me ship

Bitter winter love crushes the delicate petal
Shadow light whispers a vision of Spring

Worship my smelly head

Trudge through the forest of language
Produce beauty

Lick your smelly head.


Can you guess which lines were written by 14 year old Davey?  It's really not hard to pick huh?  Davey really enjoys our fridge poetry and was horrified when he came home one day to find I'd wiped the poetry section of the fridge clean and placed all the words back in the word pool lower down on the fridge.  Once I told him I'd written all the craziness down on paper to keep, he was OK with it, and could see that we needed to start again, as the lines had all begun to stagnate and nothing new was appearing.

16 & 17 year old boys who visit our house make a bee line for the fridge now to share little gems like:

Smooth knives chant death over sausage

Water sleeping delicious dreams

TVs swim like sweat in black puppy drool

Girlfriend scream honey blood

The boys really work at these little lines.  Some of them profess to hate English and reading novels, yet they'll spend a lot of time pondering how to put the odd collection of words that are provided, into some sort of recognisable structure.

I like how our fridge poetry is a mixture of seriousness, silliness, beauty, gaucheness, poetry and mangled words.  It's life with teens encapsulated on my fridge door!

Comments

[Daisy]

This is wonderful! I like the vision of the knives hovering over sausage. Love teen boys...at least sometimes.

[Maureen at IslandRoar]

We have had those magnetic kits for years; maybe cuz I'm a poet. But yeah, kids would come in the house and make crazy lines for poems or awful grocery lists.
Lots of fun!

[K]

I have magenitc poetry too. Unfortunately mine is 'bedroom' themed and and you can make some pretty hard core poems! Fun for a cocktail party, frantically put away when the parents/IL's show up unexpectedly :)