Bonus: Kit Robinson and Dolch Sight Words

This is completely independent of the readings we're doing at this point in the semester, but something I just stumbled upon, found interesting, and thought I'd share, both as a fascinating text that fits perfectly within our work this term, and to document the way in which associatively chasing ideas down the rabbit hole can yield interesting results.

I was just spending some time thinking about how I might organize my Backgrounds for English Studies course next fall — which a few of you are signed up for — and as part of that process, I looked up a list of the most common words in the English language (thanks, Wikipedia!). One of the related links at the bottom was for the Dolch word list (a list of important yet challenging words necessary for children to learn to become fluent English speakers) and that strange eponym got me thinking about Kit Robinson's poetic sequence, "The Dolch Stanzas," which I last read several years back. Harboring the suspicion that Robinson's poems, which feature very basic and straightforward language, might be composed from the Dolch list I did a little research and found this statement, from a blog post about poetry and labor:

The question of the employment of the poet has interested me almost from the beginning. My "Taxicab Diaries," from the summer of 1971 in Boston, was the first thing I had published in Barrett Watten's This magazine. My serial poem "The Dolch Stanzas" was written in 1974 while I was working as a paraprofessional teacher's aide at a San Francisco elementary school.  Like work of mine to come, "Dolch" made use of the material of the workplace, in this case the Dolch Basic Sight Word List.

What makes this particular interesting for our class is the nature of many of the words on the list, as this page notes: "Many of the 220 words in the Dolch list, can not be 'sounded out,' and hence must be learned by sight." Thus the phonemic character of these words comes via memorization, rather than any visual cues.

If you'd like to read Robinson's brief sequence, you can find it here; a 1990 reading of the series can be found here: [MP3]

Bonus Fun Fact: Kit Robinson and I share the same birthday (May 17), which is a popular birthday for poets, also being shared by Lyn Hejinian and Sara Wintz. Go Taureans!