Lisa Julie
LEARNING AND TEACHING POETICALLY
How can we maintain a sense of wonder into our adult lives and encourage it in the children we encounter and teach?
As we prepare to celebrate International Day of Education on 24 January, the AVBOB Poetry Project has invited Lisa Julie, poet, performer and literary scholar, to reflect on what it means to write, learn and teach poetically. Julie is a Mellon Mays scholar and holds an MA degree in Creative Writing from the University of the Western Cape. Her work has been published in several anthologies, notably in Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way (uHlanga, 2017).
Some of her finest poems to date chronicle the joys and challenges she experienced while looking after neurodiverse children. One of these, called ‘Sounds’, begins:
“He says honeybees are wired to a sound threshold,
And that vibrations spark the construction of the hive.
He says it is a sound that is felt and not heard that signals danger,
And that he sometimes hears with the ears inside his belly.”
This was how she learned about the frustrations of living with dysphonia – an increased sensitivity to specific noises.
She writes, “These poems grapple with inadequacy and discomfort, but also advocate for ‘tending’ to that discomfort, for a sense of care – care for ourselves and for the children who rely on us.”
The poem does not offer solutions to the boy’s challenges. Instead, it provides us with a clear image of his experience and leads us deeper into his story. In this way, a poem about teaching a boy turns into a poem that teaches us to become better listeners and storytellers.
Julie confirms this deep connection between teaching and poetic storytelling.
“Teaching is a lot like storytelling. If I think about my favourite teachers – they were all fantastic storytellers because they embodied the books they were teaching. They were poetic in the sense that critical thinking happened imaginatively, and we all entered into the story.”
“The word I like to associate with education is ‘nourishment’, which connotes sustenance. We typically think of nourishment only in terms of the body. But education is also a constituent of self-preservation. It should support and contribute to the nourishment of the self.”
As one of the organisers of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Collective, Julie is deeply involved in sustaining platforms for poets from different traditions, at different levels of experience. She reminds us that poetry is found and should be encouraged everywhere: in the code-switching speech of ordinary people and the inspired utterances of children.
“I once heard a little girl’s remark about the borehole water and the brown stains it leaves on walls and everything else. She said: ‘Dis seker geroeste water’. It’s probably rusted water. That’s poetry.”
When asked how she would celebrate International Day of Education, Julie shares,
“I would hope for a collective focus on whether or not education, in South Africa and throughout the world, is aiding young people to know and love themselves – so that they can understand their place in the world. And stories help tremendously. I write so that I can remember my place in the world. And I teach so that I can continue to remember.”
In the next few days, write a poem about the greatest teacher you have had, or about the kind of teacher you would have liked to have but never did.
The 2026 AVBOB Poetry Competition is opening for submissions on 1 August 2025. Visit the AVBOB Poetry website at www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and read some of the prize-winning poems from previous years as you prepare to find your own best words.