pi & anne

We need more accessible essays, discussions and learning platforms for haiku. Why am I saying this? Why should a writer of an essay be interested in using easy language?

Before I dive in

I’m talking about unnecessarily difficult language here. There are different kinds of difficult. Using a lot of loan words for example. Writing long sentences. Including a lot of filler phrases. When I say “poetry” and “poetry theory” in the next paragraphs, I’m having haiku in mind. Anyway.

Let’s start.

I’m writing this as someone who desperately loves to learn about poetry and writing. But I get stuck at a certain point with the material I can learn from. There are writers of essays, blogs, books about poetry theory that excel in academic language and loan words. So they use them! There can be several reasons for this.

• They’re used to speak like this, for example.
• They come from an academic background where it was expected and applauded (good marks!).

What this complex language also does:

• It can hide that you don’t know exactly what you are talking about.
• It can showcase how good you are in writing difficult texts.
• It is deliberately directed at a group of people expected to be interested in learning poetry theory. So it is elitist and excluding.
• You can make something short very, very long. Why explain it using easy language when you can write a whole page saying the same thing over and over, just by rephrasing it? This is indeed a skill, but I’m not convinced it’s worth cultivating.

We don’t have the same chances as we don’t have the same access.

       a door slams shut
       but it doesn't need the door at all
       it's a broken record, no matter how
       you look at it

When I say I don’t get (understand) something, it means I can reread it as much as I want, it just creates a knot in my brain. At the end of the sentence I’ve already forgotten how it started. I would need to ask for help.

It’s no easy task to write to the author and ask them to ‘translate’ what they wanted to express. Because I would be very busy with that, there are a lot of things I would need to ask about, every other page. I would feel like being a burden. I would have to explain myself and my needs over and over again. I would fear being treated as … dumb. Clueless. Less.

As I had for more than five years major depression, I have problems reading longer texts and sentences. There are many other people and poets who have similar problems. Like completing tasks that have several steps. Having memory problems. Struggling with using the internet or how social interactions work.

So, the world of literature, literary teaching, and also publications is partially inaccessible to writers. Please just take a minute and think about the many humans excluded from learning, developing and sharing their poetry. We miss out on important voices.

So what makes a text easier to access and read?

• Use paragraphs. Write shorter paragraphs.
• Use titles.
• Use good contrast, a reasonable font size and fonts.
• Reread your sentences, break them up in shorter ones when they stretch across too many lines.
• Ask yourself after each paragraph: what did I want to say? And if the answer is ‘I don’t know’, reword it. If the answer is easier worded, use that instead.
• Cut out any unnecessary words and phrases. This is no competition to prove your literacy. At least it should not be.
• Write a short summary in the end.
• Leave contact informations for queries.
• Reply with kindness. People are not out there explicitly wanting to annoy you or ‘play dumb’. They often just don’t understand and would like to.
• Let someone with a learning disability read your text before publishing.

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What I wanted you to take away from this post:

The way we provide information can be excluding. Disabled poets have less access to learning possibilities. We miss out on voices in the poetry community. The world needs to hear the poetry of disabled poets, and we are many. Thinking ahead when you write teaching material is a compassionate, kind act.