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Wednesday's poem adventure happened courtesy Steven Ross Smith's "n.", from his Fluttertongue, Book 1: The Book of Games. One of my students had selected it.

It's the kind of poem--does anyone know how I can link to this poem, by the way, without keying it into this blog?--that requires enlarging, the better to focus on individual letters, sounds, syllables. So I blew it up to hand out. At the last minute I decided to write it on the blackboard

[a digression: I like to tease my students sometimes about "old-time education" involving memorizing poems, or working silently while I walk around with a yardstick (try to find a yardstick nowadays), or writing their answers on the blackboard]

so I could run the chalk back and forth as we considered the various dynamics at work in Smith's poem. My students, bless their hearts, were more or less willing to play along--play being, I think, exactly what the poem does and wants us to do.