The Chair

While working on the seemingly endless Salvation Army project, we also had the task of reading The Chair by Galen Cranz. The book is about, you guessed it, chairs! It discusses the history of the chair, its place in society and how it is viewed and used today. Also, it largely focuses on the health issues that arise from forcing our bodies to form to a 90 degree seated position throughout the entirety of our lives. Cranz also talks about different designers and ergonomic developments in seating throughout the history of the chair and in recent years. Reading this book made me think about chairs in a new way, which I'm sure was Stoel's intention when asking us to read it.

Not only did we read the book, but we also wrote found poems from our reading. For those who don't know, a found poem is a poem that uses words that are found in a reading. Most people in the class made a list of words that they found, some lists had words that all related in some way or another while others seemed more random. A few people wrote poems that rhymed, or printed their words on the paper to look like a chair. For the second part of the book we had to write a Haiku with words that we found. I think that the poems were a good way of getting everyone to be more familiar with and have a better understanding of the text.