So I mentioned last week that my Capstone reflected that most students retain lessons about reading poetry better through writing poetry. This doesn't mean they have to write poems, but it seriously helps retention and comprehension. Creation is the highest level of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Many teachers wish they spent more time teaching composition of poetry. Most teachers report that they do not because of time constraints or feeling uncomfortable on how to assess student poems. I can't answer all these questions. However, I can reveal some lessons/prompts that will help students engage with SPIs we already have to teach. Again these all come from The Practice of Poetry edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell.
1. Finding the failure of language
a. assign students to think of some experience, feeling, or mood where you struggle to express what really happened. Perhaps this is a terrifying, beautiful, or sad experience of emotional intensity where words fall short.
b. Ask students to write a twenty-line poem in which they use similes and metaphors to convey this feeling.
c. Students can use as many similes or metaphors as they want but they cannot use fewer than five.
d. The focus is to attain the unattainable. If you know how to say something, metaphors and similes are just decorations.
This is obviously a great exercise after teaching metaphor and simile. It shows students why writers use metaphors or similes and why students would want to use metaphors or similes in their own writing. This can be talked out verbally first with the students. Tell them we do it all the time. If someone scares us, we tell them they popped out of nowhere like a ghost. We use "like" all the time to let people know that it will better capture the experience.
Here is my example poem:
Hush
BY DAVID ST. JOHN
for my son
The way a tired Chippewa woman
Who’s lost a child gathers up black feathers,
Black quills & leaves
That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag
Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always
As if it were the child,
Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever,
That the child can find its own way at last;
Well, I go everywhere
Picking the dust out of the dust, scraping the breezes
Up off the floor, & gather them into a doll
Of you, to touch at the nape of the neck, to slip
Under my shirt like a rag—the way
Another man’s wallet rides above his heart. As you
Cry out, as if calling to a father you conjure
In the paling light, the voice rises, instead, in me.
Nothing stops it, the crying. Not the clove of moon,
Not the woman raking my back with her words. Our letters
Close. Sometimes, you ask
About the world; sometimes, I answer back. Nights
Return you to me for a while, as sleep returns sleep
To a landscape ravaged
& familiar. The dark watermark of your absence, a hush.
2. Color & Motif
a. Assign to students to write a poem where the name of a color is repeatedly frequently throughout the poem.
b. Begin by cataloging the images associated with that color
c. Consider the symbolic associations with that color
d. Also consider the personal history you have with the poem
e. Then decide on a narrative of the poem or an organization of associative images
This is a lesson in motifs, a repeated symbol. Students could define motif for me, but using one in a poem lends you to like poems and locate them in texts quickly. Students will understand what good motifs are and how many different connections one can make to a motif. Let me show you a poem:
February: The Boy Breughel
By Norman Dubie, 1945
The birches stand in their beggar’s row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
These icy trees
Are hanging by their thumbs
Under a sun
That will begin to heal them soon,
Each will climb out
Of its own blue, oval mouth;
The river groans,
Two birds call out from the woods
And a fox crosses through snow
Down a hill; then, he runs,
He has overcome something white
Beside a white bush, he shakes
It twice, and as he turns
For the woods, the blood in the snow
Looks like the red fox,
At a distance, running down the hill:
A white rabbit in his mouth killed
By the fox in snow
Is killed over and over as just
Two colors, now, on a winter hill:
Two colors! Red and white. A barber’s bowl!
Two colors like the peppers
In the windows
Of the town below the hill. Smoke comes
From the chimneys. Everything is still.
Ice in the river begins to move,
And a boy in a red shirt who woke
A moment ago
Watches from his window
The street where an ox
Who’s broken out of his hut
Stands in the fresh snow
Staring cross-eyed at the boy
Who smiles and looks out
Across the roof to the hill;
And the sun is reaching down
Into the woods
Where the smoky red fox still
Eats his kill. Two colors.
Just two colors!
A sunrise. The snow.
Some poems and lessons for your consideration,
Grace & Peace,
Rory
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