The Conference

Carol Griffiths, Turkey

Last week I was at a conference on language and literature.
I dutifully sat through erudite lectures about
A Cosmopolitan Humanistic Approach,
Multiculturism, Dialogism and Intertextuality,
The Politics of Contemporary Postmodernism,
Metafiction and Historiography,
Language Socialization via Neologism,
Hypertextual Transformation, Etc., etc.
            The audience sat in silence
            Apparently paying careful attention
            Dutifully taking notes.
When it came to my turn
To present “Using literature to teach language”
I worried that, compared with the others,
It did not sound sufficiently academic and intellectual.
Maybe they would think it was boring or inferior?
Maybe they would think I didn’t really know
What I was talking about? Maybe…..?????
            Anyway, it was my turn. No escape!!
            I talked about using stories and novels
            And poetry and drama in the language classroom
            And I used some of my own favourites to illustrate
To finish, I read “The Parrot” by Michael Swan.
It describes the parrot, colourful and free
Reduced to a poem in black and white
Reduced to an excessively tedious lecture
With grey shapes taking notes
            When I showed the last slide of a brilliantly coloured parrot
            Sitting in a tree top which I had found on Google clip art
            And read the last line, “The parrot did well not to come”
            My audience laughed

I think we were laughing at the same thing!!