My daughter is an excellent poet. None of her words are written. They are spoken as a burst of starlings into the winter morning sky. Or, as a mischievous whisper peeking its prairie dog head in and out of a burrow. She is frank, often rude by some yardsticks, and feral. I have heard her growl and say please in the same breath. She is one of the more forthright communicators I know, while at the same time remaining incomprehensible. She is three years old. Through her, I am pulled back to the very foundations of word craft.
As a teacher in the Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program, I’ve taken more than one insight on language from time spent with children. I weave these observations into my lesson plans, letting them reveal a broader path or entire rooms of possibility. Whatever we think language is, it is more. Whatever limits we have set upon language can be broken, bent, and blurred, or woven like strands in a medieval tapestry of fantastical beasts. We do it so easily when we are children. Some of us grow into confined adults, afraid or ashamed to play with language. We are taught there is a right way to use language, just as there is a right way to draw and a right way to play any given instrument. If we are lucky, after learning these right ways, we find a grown over and jungle-like path back to our younger selves and question all we’ve been taught. We take creative risks and experiment with all the ways an idea or a feeling can be said, written, sung, painted, danced, enacted.
Taking care of a toddler is by turns frustrating and freeing. Just yesterday I watched her thrash about the zoo parking lot, too big now for me to pick her up and put her in the car seat without her cooperation. “I want to stay,” she screamed, “I want to feed ghosts.” She meant goats. “It’s time to go home,” I said, for it had been three hours and lunch was imminent, at least for me. She sometimes prefers to survive on cheese sticks and apple sauce pouches. “No, mommy, no. Go away from me! I want to get lost.”
To anyone listening, it probably sounded like typical testy toddler stubbornness. But I know her brain, and it’s nothing short of fascinatingly wonderful. She‘s thinking of Finding Nemo, and how the parent fish and child fish are lost. It’s a scary scenario, but also, she wants it. This is the trademark developmental stage of toddlers: they feel torn between understanding themselves as one with their caregiver and discovering they are separate, independent bodies with choices of their own to make. Sometimes, she really does want me to go away so she can explore. So she can get lost and come to know the deep ocean on her own terms. The way she has expressed this with so few words is pure poetry.
In the next moment she’s on her feet, climbing into the car seat, asking to buckle herself without help, and then getting frustrated and screaming at me to help her. Then softly, please help me. I lean in to help her and she bops me on the head.
Toddler poetics is this:
Our minds change, sometimes quickly.
We don’t often know what we want.
Simple can be profound.
Wonder and confusion abound and you can feel two ways at once.
The world is big, fascinating and frightening.
There’s more than one way to say a thing.
If language is limited, use what you have: it will be novel, it will be you.
As in Mommy the clouds, are they ice?
As in I don’t want a tortilla, I want a circle.
As in Look, she’s a merbaby. She has a tail like me.
As in Take my shirt off, so I can have a belly.
I have a theory. We never completely outgrow our toddler selves. We train her. She walks in the world of adults knowing hitting is unacceptable, but inside simmers the occasional rage. She knows to say please and thank you and not ask for too much but inside she yearns to just say things plainly. We don’t talk about our poop but we think about it more than we would like to admit. Some of us would still like our nap times. And in the thick of night, don’t you yearn to snuggle a giant Minnie Mouse and know that in the morning your breakfast will be made?
All in all, we become adults, and as a by-product of this necessary process we also trim our language and tuck it into neat squares. We need toddlers and poets to re-engage our spirits, our sense of play, our love for exploration, to bring back glimpses of our untamed, roaming, searching minds. For at any age, we still have much to discover about the world, and all the worlds within the world.
Saraiya Kanning is a creative writer and visual artist with a special interest in wildlife and ecology. As an educator, she seeks to inspire students with joy and curiosity for art making. Through her teaching, she highlights the intersection of art and science and explores how one's identity connects to the places and communities in which we live. Kanning holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona. She teaches drawing and painting online and through various venues in Colorado Springs, Colorado. You can view her visual art at raebirdcreations.com or on Instagram @raebirdcreationsart.