Did you know that Canada has over 213 “non-official” languages spoken — including over 60 Indigenous languages? Did you know that multilingual people often engage in what is referred to as code-switching, which means using two or more languages at the same time in the same conversation or text?
Code-switching poetry, simply put, is poetry that features two or more languages. Try it out!
- First, download for free the first few issues of The Polyglot, Canada's first multilingual poetry magazine (www.thepolyglotmagazine.com), of which I'm the founding editor. Check out how Canadian poets have been code-switching in over 30 languages! Witness Medgine Mathurin code-switch between French, English, and Haitian Creole, and Ahmed Knowmadic rap in English, Somali, and Italian! Check them out on YouTube as well to hear their multilingual rhythms.
- Second, expand your world by checking out other international examples of multilingual poetry: Gloria Anzaldua, Derek Walcott, Antoine Cassar, Nadia Niaz, Tato Laviera, Lorna Dee Cervantes! One Spanglish poem I fell in love with as a student was “Doña Josefina Counsels Doña Concepción Before Entering Sears” by Maurice Kilwein Guevara. There is a wonderful animated video online, narrated by the poet himself!
- Third, it's time for YOU to conjure up a multilingual poem that code-switches! You have many options: 1) You can choose to have one “carrier” or main language that makes up most of the poem and that is broken up by words and phrases in other languages; 2) You can have two languages weaving in and out of each other; or 3) You can even feature two or more languages in approximately the same proportion.
These are just some examples — in truth there are as many ways of incorporating multiple languages into poetry as there are multilingual poets, and no one model is “correct.” Perhaps the only “rule” is that the languages must each serve an aesthetic and/or semantic purpose and contribute to the effect of the poem as a whole!