This one goes out to all of my English teachers. We have finished the EOC, and to some degree we are no free. Many English teachers that I have spoken to tell me that they spend this time working on creative writing. I would like to make my bid that poetry is added to the mix. I have hear some fun prompts and ideas to help newbies to poetry get the ball rolling in their mind.
If you are not an English teacher, do not despair. These are also great activities for you to practice your craft of poetry. As a disclaimer (and I will include a citation at the end of this), these ideas come from The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. My wife gave this book to me a few years ago in order for me to practice poetry. However, now it is a great gift for me in teaching poetry. I have personally tried these prompts and activities to see how effective they are.
My first is a batch of three. All three of these relate to brainstorming. These are tools to tap into the unconscious and make something entirely unnatural, natural. I will also have an example poem of these guys :)
1. The first one is a free write activity. These are the steps.
a. Write without stopping for a set period of time or until you reach a certain predetermined point on the page (like the end). Keyboards are better for these because you create more words faster. Keep it short (5-7 min).
b. When you reach the allotted time or distance, put away the paper. Give yourself or your students some distance from the writing. DO NOT READ IT.
c. Either do this for multiple pages and periods of time if working over multiple days or wait till you have distanced yourself or forgotten what you wrote.
d. Read over what you wrote, underline anything that seems in any way interesting, fresh, weird, or ressonant. Trust your instincts.
e. Pull out these underlined fragments. Correct punctuation, spelling, etc. Rewrite the fragments.
f. Repeat rules d and e for each section. This time, be a harsher critic and choose only the top of the top images, words, and phrases. You will end up with about 1 to 2% of the original text.
g. Create a poem around these fragments as the skeleton.
2. This is called translations and serves more to teach students that no one thinks in abstractions.
a. Step one, tell students that you will put a word on the board and they must write down everything that comes to mind when, no matter how weird or strange, when they heard that word.
b. Write down abstract words such as Love, Death, Self, Soul, Race, Order, Justice, Common, Solitude, Ecstasy, Evil, Gratitude, Mercy, Pain, Hunger, God, History, War, or Peace.
c. Have students share what they wrote. They will be images, some may be bizarre (like rice pudding) but the general gist will be that no one thinks in abstractions, they see images.
d. Track student images. If they say Rice Pudding for war, then try again with Rice Pudding, what comes to mind there? And keep tracking the images all the way back to some root that connects Rice Pudding with War. Or you can track normal answers, like a dog coming up for Love.
e. Take the trackings and draw out those images. Ask them to describe in sensory details the images that come to mind for these words. These images are the beginnings of poems that lead the reader to these abstract thoughts.
3. This one is to take emotional triggers from poems and insert them into a students new poems.
a. This begins with the teacher reading a poem. Preferably a poem students have never heard. The poem should be about a journey. (I have a suggested poem below)
b. Students listen carefully. Afterwards, they write down any evocative word or phrases that are still lingering in their mind.
c. Students write a poem where they imagine they are taking a journey. The journey must be through a real (concrete) space and to a real and concrete destination. The focus is to use the words that stood out to the students as a guide to the location in the poem. The borrowed words act as a scaffold suggesting mood, landscape, details, and a core of narrative for the students chronicling this imaginary travel.
Here is a suggested poem for this activity to read aloud.
A Blessing
BY JAMES WRIGHT
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Next week, some more activities and exercises!
Grace and Peace,
Rory
No comments:
Post a Comment