Inspiring Writers with Student Poetry

It’s National Poetry Month, so teachers everywhere are sharing poetry and experimenting with poetry writing in the classroom. The challenge is that those two activities are sometimes at cross purposes. Reading poetry by the literary greats can silence the muse of even the most imaginative student.

Sharing poems written by students alongside those in the literature textbooks can be the solution. The process simultaneously tells students that their poetry is just as important as any other poets and provides students with level-appropriate models for their own writing.

The National Gallery of Writing is the ultimate resource for student poetry examples. Not only will you find hundreds of poems written by students from all over the United States, but you also can show students that their work is just as worthy of publication as those Shakespearean sonnets they’ve been reading.

The process is simple. Go to the The National Gallery of Writing, find some poems you like and share them with students. You might also send students to several specific galleries and let them find something they like.

You can search the Gallery for the keyword “poetry” in the description field. Narrow your search further by state and country, if you’d like to find local or regional student work.

Here are some collections that have a number of wonderful, classroom-ready poems. Note that some galleries also include fiction, memoirs, and other student writing.

• Poetry Cafe (E)
• From Room 609, 8th Grade Panthers Write (M)
• Brooks Writers (M)
• Southfield-Lathrup Poetry (S)
• Los Gatos High School Poetry Pavilion (S)
• NJCTE High School POETRY Contest 2010 (S)
• Poetry Community of Kennedy-King College (C)
• NCTE-CEE Commission on the Teaching of Poetry Writing (G)

After students write their own poems, you can invite them to add their work to an open gallery. The NCTE-CEE Commission on the Teaching of Poetry Writing, for instance, is open to all poets. You may find a specific gallery for your geographical area that is open for submissions as well. Additionally, you can still start a local gallery for students in your class or at your school if you like.

 

Writing Our Way Through the End of School and Into Next Year

Writing is such a balm when the spring sun shines or even when April is “cruelest of all.” Even our toughest students can usually be persuaded to pen a poem this time of year. There are so many resources for teachers and students to use, and I’ve gathered up a few to share.

The National Gallery of Writing awaits more writing and more galleries. The Gallery will be open at least until June 2011 AND on October 20, 2010, we’ll celebrate our second National Day on Writing! What better affirmation for writers than to be published in a national gallery for people all over the world to see and read?

Maybe you and your students want to take a look at the Gallery before you decide what to publish. There are several local galleries and poems listed in the ideas section of the March 23 edition of INBOX. I’d start there.

You might try the website of the Academy of American Poets for a wealth of information and ideas for reading, writing, and learning about poetry and poets. I really like the Poetry Map and, of course, there’s the April 29 Poem in Your Pocket Day including many resources, even pocket-ready poems.

You might like to share in one of my fun activities. I compose haiku in my head when I’m walking my dog! I just observe something along the way—the sunrise, the breeze in the trees, the ducks on the pond—and I begin a line working toward a succinct 5-7-5 description. I hope you’ll improve on what I do by remembering to write the poems down when you get back from the walk! Or even better, students could carry a cell phone and either text (watch out for bumps along the path!) or call a friend with their haiku; they could carry an old-fashioned notebook.

I’d like to recommend three of the many NCTE books on poetry and teaching poetry:

Stephen Dunning’s and William Stafford’s time-tested NCTE book Getting the Knack is still among my favorites for down to earth ideas for getting our students writing poetry.

Bea Cullinan’s A Jar of Tiny Stars: Poems by NCTE Award-Winning Poets is an excellent collection of sample poems by children’s poets.

Jaime R. Wood’s Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom hooks in middle schoolers with lessons about poems by contemporary poets of color.

Mostly, I’d like to recommend you and your students join me in writing poetry for National Poetry Month in April!

Parents, Political Staff, and Print Literacy

On her blog last week, Arapahoe High School English Teacher Michelle Davis asked the parents of her ninth graders to write about how learning to write effectively is important. And they did! Parents wrote about the necessity of accurate written communication in a medical facility where the patient’s care would be carried out only according to the written notes on the chart, about the importance of getting the right language down in oil and gas leases, about emailing as the important communication on the job, and more.

And while they wrote, Huck Gutman, chief of staff for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, wrote about poetry in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He wrote that as a former Professor of English, he misses teaching poetry, which means much to him, adding that teaching is in many ways a more fulfilling job than working in the Senate. He followed by describing how he’s taken to sending the poems of poets such as William Carlos Williams, Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, and Wordsworth to other people, from friends to colleagues, people in Washington, D.C., and former students and people he meets at yard sales. His conclusion: people, many who’ve never studied poetry, love to get the poems he sends and they love to enjoy them with him--they also enjoy the commentaries he sends along with the poems.

Then, Paul Barnwell wrote his commentary in Education Week , “Literacy Accountability in a New-Media Age.” He begins:

Walking through the hallways of the middle school where I teach, I inevitably hear students talk about music Web sites, blogs, Web-based photo albums, Facebook pages, and other forms of new media.

If we judged these students’ ability to interpret and gather information solely based on their mastery of print media, we’d be doing ourselves—and society—a huge disservice.

Michelle Davis, Huck Gutman, and Paul Barnwell agree on three important beliefs behind the National Gallery of Writing :

1. Effective writing is important—not just in school but long after that in the jobs we do in the world.

2. People enjoy reading others’ writings even when they're not assigned to do so and they learn from those writings.

3. Print is not the only form of composition, nor the only form of writing that we need to teach and test to show that our students have learned and can think critically.

Daring to Disturb the Universe

I was pleased to open my March issue of English Journal to find Paul Sahre’s stark and striking poster promoting National Poetry Month. (Language Arts and Voices from the Middle subscribers have the poster as well.)

Written in all caps, neatly, but with an occasional slant that suggests potential instability beneath the surface, is this profound question from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

Did I mention that the words are traced on a rain-soaked window pane? Or is that a steamed shower door? The combination of text and image is as richly evocative as the poem and speaker to which the poster refers.

“Prufrock” is a poem with special significance to me. Unlike the general English teacher populace, I was indifferent toward literature and reading in high school. But the day we turned the page in our anthology to Eliot’s lengthy poem, and the speaker invited me into the text with “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” I read and listened with rapt attention.

We didn’t spend much time with the poem—probably just a class period—but I still remember my first exposure to the images of cat-like smoke and ragged claws; the tense playfulness of rhymes such as “afternoons” and “coffee spoons” or “ices” and “crisis;” the dilemma of the speaker that was well beyond my adolescent understanding.

I think of that day as a gift of sorts.

So, it seems, did one of my students on the day I first shared “Prufrock” with a classroom of my own. I used it to start a poetry unit, inviting students to make observations and ask questions as I read the text aloud. I didn’t say anything about my prior experiences with the poem or my personal purpose in selecting it.

The conversation was rich, and we spent the hour making a first pass at a text we would return to throughout the unit. As the class filed out the door at the end of the period, a student stopped to thank me for sharing “Prufrock” with him.

I was shocked, not only because a student was thanking me for what just happened in class, but also because he was having the same reaction to the poem I had felt ten or so years before.

At the end of that school year, a different student sent me a note of thanks for our time together in the course. “I came into this class thinking that talking about books and poems was going to be a waste of my time,” she wrote. “I’m grateful that ‘In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’”

Not every poem will have that kind of resonance with our students, and not all students will express their gratitude in such an articulate way. But what a heartening reminder that we get the chance to disturb so many universes when we share great literature with our students.

Writing Poetry: Putting Chaos into Perspective

As National Poetry Month approaches, I have to make a confession. Though I find it rewarding and enjoyable to read poetry with students and deepen their appreciation of poetry through response and analysis, I never asked students to write their own poetry. Never.

There are a number of ways I can rationalize this pedagogical choice. Chief among those reasons is the far greater curricular pressure in high school to develop students’ ability to write about poetry rather than to create poems themselves. But, in truth, I was succumbing to a stimulus even more powerful than anything so logical: I was afraid.

I don’t write poetry. I have no formal training in how to teach students to write a poem. And, most significantly, I have no sense of how to respond to student poetry. With apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay, adolescent chaos in fourteen lines was not something I felt equipped to face. I’m not even going to bring into the discussion the idea of evaluation (or, worse yet, grading). The entire process seemed beyond my grasp.

Then I participated in the Summer Institute of a the local Writing Project site and did what you’re supposed to do there: I took a risk as a writer. Given the freedom in morning writing time to ponder, compose, and revise—and with the knowledge that I could share this piece with a community of supportive and invested readers, or keep it private, or throw it away and never mention that I tried—I did it. I wrote a poem.

I’m confident that even this single creative act is enough to embolden me to offer students the chance to write poetry in my class. I certainly don’t have the answers to all the conundrums I posed—how to teach poetry writing, how to respond to student poetry, how to evaluate it—at least not yet.

But with apologies to another poet, now I’m willing to travel down that road that I’d chosen not to take before.

Celebrating World Poetry Day

At this time of year as a classroom teacher, I always looked forward to April and teaching poetry during National Poetry Month. I was usually successful in finding some poets and specific poems that resonated with my third and fourth graders. Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky were class favorites as was the poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. The students loved the fun nature of poems by these poets. Their reactions were in line with one of the goals of National Poetry Month – to celebrate of the art of poetry and poets.

My students often used poets and poems as inspiration in their own writing, and they certainly enjoyed performing their poems for others. One year, I worked with some colleagues to organize a “Poetry Day” for our classes where we spent all day reading, writing, and performing poetry. Looking back, although we all enjoyed the poems we read, there were certainly more poets we should have explored from around the world. World Poetry Day is a good day to discover poets that may be new to you and your students.

World Poetry Day is held annually on March 21. It was originally declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1999. The purpose of the day is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world. When UNESCO declared March 21 as World Poetry Day, the stated goal was to “give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements.” To mark this year’s World Poetry Day, UNESCO will pay tribute to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was also a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature.

With my class, I would begin by researching more about Pablo Neruda – where did he come from, when did he live, what was his inspiration?

• My students would discover that Neruda always wrote using green ink, the color of hope. I would encourage my students to choose a color to write in and have them explain their choice. I think I would choose a metallic silver pen for my own writing. I would love how my writing would shimmer!
• We would examine his poem “Ode To Conger Chowder” and read about the ingredients and dishes native to Chile. I would encourage my students to write a poem about a recipe native to their own state or country. I would love to write a poem about my grandmother’s rhubarb pudding, made from the strawberry rhubarb she grew on the farm.
• My students and I would learn together more about the time and place in which Neruda lived and how that may have affected his writing. What was Chile like in the early to mid-1900s? If we wrote about our world today, what would we choose to write about?
• The class would also learn that Pablo Neruda was very involved in politics throughout his life. He died in 1973, two weeks after a change in government in Chile. My students and I could write a poem in the voice of Neruda, reacting to this change.

There are so many possibilities with poetry. Reading, writing, and performing are obvious choices. How else can poetry be part of the curriculum? Find a poet unknown to the class and engage in an inquiry project. Learn as much as you can and share with others. Find poets and poems that students can make personal connections to – how do they see themselves represented? Much like the celebration with my students, how can poems be used to celebrate language and all of its richness?

So as March 21 approaches, invite students to share their favorite poetry, go out into the community and attend poetry readings, or find books of poetry at the library or bookstore that can help you celebrate World Poetry Day.

Wordle and the Inauguration

Remember Wordle? Extremely popular last July, the site makes word clouds from text passages. As the introduction on the site's homepage explains:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Don’t dismiss it though. For English teachers, Wordle is far more than just a simple “toy.” It’s a great analysis tool, as I reported last year.

A post last week on the ReadWriteWeb blog reminded me how wonderful the tool is at providing a snapshot of the key ideas behind a message. Author Marshall Kirkpatrick shares word clouds for President Obama’s inaugural address alongside clouds for George W. Bush’s, Bill Clinton’s, Ronald Reagan’s, and Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural addresses.

Take a look at the largest words in the images, and the issues that each president focuses on are obvious:

President & Speech	Most Frequent Word
Obama 2009	nation
Bush 2005	freedom
Clinton 1997	century
Reagan 1981	government
Lincoln 1861	Constitution
Lincoln 1865	war

The words alone are only part of the story, but they can point student readers toward the speeches with more information. The Wordle clouds are a remarkable prereading tool. First look at the map with students and discuss the words that stand out. Why would the speaker focus on those words? How do they predict the speaker will use them? What senses of the words will the speaker avoid? As they begin reading the addresses, students can look for the key terms and see whether their predictions were accurate and make note of how key words are used in different contexts within the text.

If you have already discussed Obama’s address with the class, why not try the Wordle clouds for inaugural poems? There have been four poems written for U.S. presidential inaugurations, and there are a number of resources available for teaching these poems, including an Education World lesson, a Teacher Vision lesson, and a BITs post.

Begin your exploration of the poems with Wordle images like this one of Alexander’s poem, or one of the other images linked below:

• Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem (2009)
• Miller Williams's inaugural poem (1997)
• Maya Angelou's inaugural poem (1993)
• Robert Frost's inaugural poem (1961) and the poem he recited

Ask students to explore how the words that stand out in the clouds for the poems might predict the themes and symbols that will be developed in the poems. As students analyze the poems more deeply, connect the poets’ use of repetition and word choice affects the message of the poems.

No matter how you use Wordle images, they're a great tool for exploring the ways that writers use words—and if the analysis engages students in a bit of fun, that’s okay. Go ahead and call Wordle a toy. That won’t stop students from engaging in a good bit of critical thinking!

Inspiration for Student Poetry and Prose

As National Poetry Month comes to a close, inspire students to write original poems with help from other texts, creating their own found poems. NCTE’s best-selling book Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises explains the process of writing “Found & Headline Poems.” To compose a found poem, the writer searches for meaningful words, phrases, and images from an original text and then shapes them into an original work. It’s a sort of “quick start” poem—the writer begins with a ready sample of ideas, and simply chooses and arranges the work into something new. If the writer is using words only, you might think of a found poem as a sort of word collage.

A new teacher resource from the Library of Congress, Making Connections through Poetry, includes a gallery of primary documents that students use to compose and illustrate their own poems. The collections range across the entire span of the nation’s history and include specific touchpoints on such topics as U.S. involvement in national and international wars, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. The new ReadWriteThink lesson plan Rummaging for Fiction: Using Found Photographs and Notes to Spark Story Ideas (S) uses the Library of Congress site as inspiration to help students identify subjects, settings, characters, and conflicts for pieces of creative writing.

This technique can be adapted to any historical period or content area. For instance, if you’re celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday this week, ask students to use Primary Sources on the Folger Shakespeare Museum site as inspiration for their poems. Any site that includes primary sources or literary texts can be a resource. You might tap the Treasures in Full from the British Library, The Online Library of Literature, Historical Minutes from the U.S. Senate, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, or Letters and Diaries Online.

For materials that explore found poetry with all grade levels, visit these additional ReadWriteThink resources:

• A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry (E)
• Poetry from Prose (E)
• Found Poems/Parallel Poems (M)
• Finding Poetry in Pleasure Reading (M)
• Finding Poetry in Prose: Reading and Writing Love Poems (S)
  
  

What’s Your Poem?

This year, the Academy of American Poets is introducing a new celebration as part of National Poetry Month—Poem in Your Pocket Day. On April 17, people across the United States are invited to choose a favorite poem and carry it in their pockets. Just carrying a poem is only part of the celebration though. During the day, poetry lovers are encouraged to unfold and read their pocketed poems in celebration of the visions of poets.

This may be the most challenging day ever for an English teacher like me. How can I possibly choose just one poem? When I first discussed Poem in Your Pocket Day with colleagues, one of them joked about carrying around a copy of “The Wasteland” in his pocket. I love Eliot too, but I’d be more likely to carry “Preludes.” It’s far more portable, but it’s also filled with imagery that I love.

But could I limit it just to “Preludes”? What about my love for the deep allusions in Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”? Sure everyone knows “In a Station of the Metro”—and there is perhaps no poem more perfectly suited for pocketing—but my heart belongs to the classical references of “Mauberly.” Yet is that the right poem?

What about all those Nikki Giovanni poems I adore? And how can I forget Robert Frost and Langston Hughes? Wait, and Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Blake? And I have such a nice soft spot for Christina Rossetti. And I almost forgot about William Butler Yeats!

Perhaps choosing is just too difficult. Maybe I should just write my own, with apologies to William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon

a single
poem

laced with waiting
words

inside my pants
pocket.

Not the work of a great poetic mind, but how can you choose just one anyway? So what’s your poem? What poet will you carry in your pocket for Poem in Your Pocket Day?

Online Tools for Poets

Looking for some online fun as you celebrate National Poetry Month? These tools provide some great places to start!

• Write the Acrostic Poems the typical way they are taught, asking students to compose poems that highlight their names or significant nouns. Try the activity with literature by having students compose poems for character and place names in a recent reading (e.g., Boo Radley, Maycomb, Atticus Finch). Extend Acrostic Poems to content areas by asking students to create acrostics for key vocabulary terms.
  
  
• Invite students to publish their poems with the Stapleless Book. Students might write a series of shorter poems, one on each page of the book. Haiku lend themselves to this strategy. The Stapleless Book can also be used to publish one poem, with a line or two on each page of the book.
  
  
• Combine a bit of grammar review with poetry by asking students to compose Diamante Poems, which use specific parts of speech to contrast different aspects of a single topic or to compare two different topics. The technique can work well in a review of thematic units such as “innocence to experience” or to compare two characters from a work of literature (e.g., Othello and Iago).
  
  
• Explore the genre of Letter Poems with students and then ask students to use the Letter Generator to publish their work. Elementary teachers can use the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Letter Poems Deliver: Experimenting with Line Breaks in Poetry Writing, which incorporates the online tools.
  
  
• Describe objects in poems that are published in the object's shape with Shape Poems. Students can publish poems about Nature, School, Sports, and Celebrations. For example, after a study of the Water Cycle publish shape poems in the shape of the sun, a raindrop, or a cloud.
  
  
• Have a bit of fun online with Magnetic Poetry Kids' Kits, High School Kit, or general collections, including a Shakespeare Kit. Note that some of the general sets will not be appropriate for students (e.g., the Innuendo Kit or the Pickup Lines Kit), so provide students with the direct link to the tools that you choose rather than sending them to the general collections page.
  
  

Bringing Poetry to Life through Performance

Even if it weren’t National Poetry Month, April would make me think of poetry. As soon as I realized it was April, my brain automatically began chanting to me:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour

I can usually stop it at that point, and yes, I honestly recite the poem in middle English. I’m a medievalist at heart, and as a student, I memorized and performed lines from The Canterbury Tales. The words are alive and fresh for me.

In a world where poems seem to be dead words upon printed pages, students may find it odd for a poem to live and breathe for a reader; but poetry performance can bring such energy to a text that, as The Canterbury Tales has for me, it can stick with readers for years.

In Chapter 12 of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing, and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom, John S. O’Connor asks:

Why is rejoicing locked up in books? Why can’t schools offer a place for rejoicing? Why do we maintain rigid distinctions between disciplines? Why can’t poems, for example, be seen through other media—music, art, dancing, theater? Why do students often see so little connection between their lives in and out of school? Poetry can provide such a connection. (139)

.As we encourage students to explore poetry with the many 21st Century literacy skills that are part of their world, they may perform sonnets as rap or compose video explorations of haiku. A free-verse poem may rethought as a PowerPoint slide show illustrating the various images in the poem. We can ask students to set favorite poems to music, to create theatrical presentations of poetry, and to illustrate the poems they enjoy. Even a simple podcast of a poem can be expanded sound effects, background music, and the reader’s vocal expression. When we ask students to perform and explore poetry in such ways, we help ensure that poetry is always a living thing for students.

The Poems in My Commonplace Book

As part of this year’s National Poetry Month celebration, the Academy of American Poets offers a list of 30 Ways to Celebrate that includes a wide range of options for exploring poetry. Of the many possibilities, the one that caught my eye was “Start a commonplace book,” which the site explains:

Since the Renaissance, devoted readers have been copying their favorite poems and quotations into notebooks to form their own personal anthologies called commonplace books.

What a challenge! Which poems to choose? How to narrow the options? I don’t have space to share them all, so I’ll share just one: “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams. It may not seem like a likely choice for me. I spend much of my time exploring symbolic poetry, full of mythological allusions and deep, complex imagery. “This Is Just to Say” is such a straightforward, little poem—but that’s why I have chosen it.

“This Is Just to Say” is a poem that is approachable. With no real effort, I can spout off the words from memory, and it’s a poem that anyone can understand. No special degrees in literature are necessary. I’ve used it successfully as a model poem for students to parody and I listen happily to the Prairie Home Companion “Guy Noir” parody of the poem.

Yet beneath that simplicity is the sharp wit and careful pen of a great poet. The poem’s line breaks and precise wording provide such a sharp image and message. The plums of the poem are like all poetry for me, a guilty pleasure that I indulge in against all the nagging demands of my daily life. Tonight, I have lesson plans to edit, laundry to wash, and an essay to write; but instead I found myself indulging in the poems I love—“Forgive me / they were delicious.”