Here's a simple assignment: Walk over to your bookshelf and select an annotated teacher's edition of a literature anthology. This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry. One wonderful aspect of poetry is that it is very subjective and what you get out of it is just as important as what the poet intended for it to mean. In fact, I encouraged them to let the lines speak to each other in whatever language seemed appropriate. The result was a highly improvisational and creative product. Fill in the gaps about Young and about the themes of the book and of Youngs work more broadly. If a student does, invite them to describe how Greek or Latin poetry is measured. Act II: Generating a Dialogue with Poetry. Last week we had a fun pizza party, and this week we're having an earth day event hosted by the United Student . Move on. Motifs can resemble archetypes. You can learn more about rhyme and meter by consulting our handout on sound and meter in poetry or the introduction to a standard textbook for poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Second, you will want to make use of numerous quotations from the poem and explain their meaning and their significance to your argument. I expected they would have been taught to think of comprehension of poetry as a sort of careful dissection, perhaps in a search for the individual elements that make the poem hold together as a piece of literature. They are constrained by the limitations of line and the elements of rhythm. If you want to say something clever about poetry, you could discuss the importance of emphasis. I have discovered that loving poetry is more like a long-term relationship than it is like a sizzling affair. When all the mystery is crushed out of a poem, when its wings are pinned forever, when it no longer makes weird noises in the night, when it has grown harmless in the collection book of the school text, the poem will have attained the state of perfect meaning which is death. However, poetry makes us experience the human condition at its most vulnerable. Poetry Off the Shelf Center Stage Listen From Poetry Off the Shelf April 2023 (It should have one of these. Each class meeting had a specific set of focuses that asked the students to practice collaboration, comprehension, and reading fluency skill sets: Guiding Topics for Workshop Sessions I appreciate a conversation among the poems. This may sound unlikely, but one of the real pleasures of poetry is the opportunity to wrestle with the text and co-create meaning with the author. Skim to the end of the poem. The invitation gave me an opportunity to hone an instructional strategy I had been developing in which students become collaborators with texts by translating the text from one mode to another. When I asked the students why the old woman didn't want to go to the hospital, I was expecting them to say something like, "Because she knows that if she goes to the hospital, she'll die." Soon, the students are itching to write. BRUMBACH: Look for imagery and repetition of words and themes that carry into each part of the book. It is first and last the document of a human experience. I was recently invited by the Carnegie Center for Literacy, a community literacy center in Lexington, Kentucky, to design a readers theater project for middle school students that would specifically address comprehension and fluency skills. Can you remember the last time you heard or read a poem? There might even be only one little phrase or line in a poem that we like, but that can be a place to begin. Futhermore, he suggests that the expert reader often needs to work in a collaborative setting in order to solve particular kinds of problems.. Paraphrase all the portions of the poem. Next comes the tricky part. If you are very new to reading poetry, maybe just read a few poems the whole way through and then come back to them later and go stanza by stanza, then come back later to go line by line. The opening Prologue is Shakespeare's summary of the play, and it took him 18 lines. Just listen. Harjos book of selected poems, How We Became Human, is one of the recent additions to the NEA Big Read library, along with two other books of poetry: Citizen by Claudia Rankine and Book of Hours by Kevin Young. In each session of the workshop, the students read poems aloud, wrote reflections in journals, developed aesthetic responses to the poemsboth writing and performance-basedand drafted material that would be used in the final readers theater script. NEA: Joy HarjosHow We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001is another new poetry title in the NEA Big Read library. Instead of just using this particular poem when I need something quick, I now use it to help us sharpen our claims. View Audio Transcript. By selecting what they do select to present to us, they tell us who they are. We apologize for the inconvenience. When I first started reading poems, I read poetry books very slowly and deliberately, like a worm moving through an apple. ). You can make your own rules here, but you should use this style to create an emotional response. BRUMBACH: Everyone knows how to talk about poetry because everyone is part of the human condition and poetry is an art that truly speaks to the human condition. For most teachers (and for all too many students) the poem has become a sideshow item, a species of literary anomaly that one walks hurriedly past with eyes half turned away, muttering, "How interesting. What other themes show up in the poem? Is it an ode? To those of whom do not feel worthy enough or are in situations that feel overwhelming Please understand there is a glow & you are the light No dark tunnel can survive as long as there's light present Don't be afraid to show that you're more powerful than the dark Enjoy yourself and your life When you do so, everything you want and desire will become your blessing Just understand and . Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. Earlier in the year, I had collaborated with college students in a Foundations of Education course to write original readers theater scripts that drew on their teaching journals, course texts, and notes they had made during classroom observations as source material. Anthologies are great for this, and a good place to start with your poetry journey. We also live in language differently when speaking it aloud. Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the poem? This is the Japanese art of poetry about the traces left by life experiences. Week 1: All defined forms of poetry share three elements: Intentional line breaks and stanza breaks Consistent rhyme scheme Adherence to the rules of meter in poetry Let's investigate each component of poem structures individually, before turning our gaze towards 15 example forms of poetry. Genre: What kind of poem are you looking at? How does that happening make you feel? This specific argument that you want to make about the poem will be your thesis. Also relevant to this category of concerns are techniques such as caesura (a pause in the middle of a line) and enjambment (continuing a grammatical sentence or clause from one line to the next). To help you enjoy poetry more! Two young lovers are destined to die, and their romance. you can organise what evidence from the text you will need. In the third session, the students worked together to draft the readers theater script by choosing lines from their journals, excerpts from the published poems we had read together, and excerpts from their own poems to generate a document that shimmered with the same kind of unusual imagery and unexpected juxtaposition of words and phrases that we often find in poetry. MATEJKA: Poetry is an experience as much as it is a concrete thing to be discussed and like all experiences, there isnt always a right or wrong answer to it. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. The objective of asking the students to respond to the poems in such unconventional ways was to assist them in developing a dialogue with the poems that would not only assure an understanding of the ideas contained within each reading, but would also establish a personal connection with the pieces and allow the students to talk back to the ideas from what I call the aesthetic perspective. I was inviting the students to respond to art in artful ways, not in academic ways. While an Eliot or a Pound may drive readers away with their difficulty, other poets find themselves dismissed as "unpoetic" because of their straightforward clarity. 2. It is useful to follow some standard conventions when writing about poetry. A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. I will never forget the reaction of one teacher during a workshop that I was giving at a Brooklyn school. Attend poetry readings in your community. In years to come, alongside medical records and political reporting, historians and classes of schoolchildren will look to art and poetry to find out what life was like on a day-to-day basis what things seemed important, what things worried people, how the world looked and felt and was experienced. And yes, the idea of death lurked behind what that boy said, but his poetic response gave the kind of luminous answer that teachers have to be ready for. Certainly the bad poetry of great poets does. Now that weve spoken about sound and emphasis, you could show off by discussing some of the most common poetry forms, including sonnets, haiku, and free verse. So treating Ms. Harjos selected poems like a greatest hitsa series of excellent, but not always narratively linked poemsallows us to appreciate the power of her individual works while also getting a glimpse of her poetic evolution between 1975-2001. I wandered lonely as a cloud. Weve put together a post on how to write and talk about poetry when you dont have a clue. To the more lyrical language of Neruda's poem on poetry, the students wrote lovely, creative lines of their own: If this poem were a burrito, it would belong to a nest of birds and would be filled with dirt and insects like bees (see below). What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poem? Remember something that happened, and look at the traces the evidence left behind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Whose woods are these I think I know. This is a great way to get kids talking about poetry without them realizing it! Edited with an introduction by Linda Welshimer Wagner (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976). First, I wanted to wish a happy Eid to everyone celebrating this week! What do you think happened in the poem? See the interview with Williams in Voices and Visions: William Carlos Williams. What a relief to understand what the writer is talking about, what he means! Time, which tames all but the wildest of lions, has tamed them, too. Join Readers Theater and you TOO can learn about poetry. in lilacs Are lilacs edible? For example, what's the cultural significance of Walt Whitman's famous elegy for Lincoln "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" in light of post-Civil War cultural trends in the U.S.A? Don't crush twelve poems onto one page; and for goodness sakes don't treat the poem as if it was a wilting violet or a new form of disease by fancying it up in Neo-unctial script. Toby Emert, Talking to, Talking about, Talking with: Language Arts Students in Conversation with Poetic Texts from. The same sensibility that kicks poems around until they stand up like man and mean also flattens butterflies under glass and mounts animal heads on den walls. Long: It is slightly longer. Everybody finds it difficult to forget rhythmical poetry. MATEJKA: A [volume of] selected poemsespecially from a writer as necessary and sustaining as Joy Harjoworks a lot like a greatest hits album because the poems come from so many different books. The poem reads us as much as we read the poem. In poem after poem this writer captured the essence of city life in language so clear and simple that it could be mistaken for prose. The directions for this assignment asked the students to look for interesting language, compelling ideas, and memorable lines: Excerpt from Doublespeak: Talking Back to Poetry, Director I: Scene Eight: Interrogating Poetry, All Readers: The secret of poetry, Director II: Is, Reader 4: The fact that its wearing smiley-, Director I: Is. What we forget is that Shelley and Byron and Keats were legendary freaks in their own time, generally impaled by critics and deemed incomprehensible. Reader 7: The moon sitting on the world. Year after year this goes on, until finally (somewhere in college) we are confronted with that terror of terrors, that event we always fear would happen: the poem has grown so complicated, so ornery, that we find it impossible to put together what we have so industriously "analyzed." Allen reminds us that choosing the right texts is critical to making students eager text users. I would suggest that it is equally important, especially when the text is a poem, to choose the right strategies for asking the students to respond to the text. The aerialists continue to be daring, the elephants charming, the acrobats skillful, and the clowns are permitted their bouts of controlled nonsense. Essay on Poetry: Topics, Outline, Tips. Be curious, and read for moments in the poems that spark your interest. Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. This website collects and publishes the ideas of individuals who have contributed those ideas in their capacities as faculty-mentored student scholars. Listen, my children, and you shall hear. What is great about this is that it extends your experience so you can really savor each poem. Readers who skip poems will miss parts of Mr. Youngs elegant world building, for example. Children love it. Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network, Independent Film & Media Arts Field-Building Initiative, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), National Endowment for the Arts on COVID-19, ARP Grant Spotlight: A Place to Be (Middleburg, VA). Now is poetry territorydangerous, infested, infectious, maddening. Writing Letters of Recommendation for Students, Writing About Film: Terminology and Starting Prompts, Close Reading a Text and Avoiding Pitfalls, Pre-writing Activities and Drafting Your Essay, Writing in Literature (Detailed Discussion), Writing in Literature: Writing the Prompt Paper, Writing in Literature: General Research Papers, Writing a Thesis Statement for a World Literature Paper--PowerPoint. This is a skill that Miles Myers describes in Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy as a trademark of those readers who are genuinely literate. Talks about Poetry 04:36 Charita Gainey How Phillis Wheatley captured the attention of the world 04:02 Naima Penniman "Being Human" 05:06 Diane J. Rayor Ancient Greece's greatest popstar 05:02 It should flow without effort. We ask students to interact with literature in ways that do not encourage them to develop long-term relationships with the texts. Here are some examples of commonly discussed figures of speech: Cultural Context: How does the poem you are looking at relate to the historical context in which it was written? Step One: Read Have your students read the poem once to themselves and then aloud, all the way through, at LEAST twice. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possiblyunder some definitionsthe primal and primary form of languages themselves. Poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Poems look different than prose on the page, and that is one of the reasons they are shaped the way they are, in lines.) Poetry, especially the teaching of how we might write it, has this wonderful ability to create a new language, to imagine new ways of seeing things, to help people to articulate what it is that theyve just been through. Write at least one poem before beginning a unit on poetry Reading Begin each class with a poem by a different poet. The collection centers on two life-altering events: the death of the poets father, and the birth of his son. This is exactly why those cut-and-dried interpretations of poems we present to our students turn them away from the life of poetry, a life which is intimately connected to the mysteries of the human soul. I want to suggest that students be allowed to discover a poem. Like X happened today and this is how I feel about it. That same model works great for poetry because reading poems can be very personal. Poetry allows you to play with words - to manipulate, to suggest, to twist, and to turn words inside out. In "interpreting" poetry, too many teachers have forgotten the great unwritten law of its mathematics: a good poem is always more than the sum of its parts. It is finished, thank God! So start first with your experience with the poemthink about its mood and tone, its underlying meaning, and then its poetic devices and how they interact to create a finished piece. To explain what "quantity" means, go over long and short vowels. Most of the time, the language we encounter isnt used in surprising ways: were reading the screen to see if the train is late, or were checking the expiration date on the milk, or were passing work informationamong colleagues. One student wrote in her journal: I think Readers Theater has been really fun. With the assistance of three college student volunteers, I implemented a series of four three-hour after-school workshops for seventh and eighth graders designed to offer the students a variety of interactions with poems. Brave and beautiful expressions from some of the world's most talented spoken-word performers, who weave stories in words and gestures. [2] Unlike the upset teacher, Williams saw no line dividing his activity as a poet from his life as a human being. Add those to the growing collection of class favorites. I asked the students to work line by line through the poem, pretending that they were talking back to the lines, asking interesting questions of them. The two sonnet forms from which all other sonnets are formed are: the Shakespearean (English) and the Petrarchan (Italian). The workshop included four dovetailed lessons, each developed to generate material for the script and also to offer students opportunities to practice their reading fluency. I sound like someone in a commercial. A second objective was to develop student-generated poetic language that would ultimately be woven into the readers theater script. The Carnegie Center had specified two objectives: (1) they wanted the work to involve readers theater, an instructional intervention known to encourage reading comprehension and fluency partially because of its reliance on oral repetition of the text during rehearsals; and (2) they wanted to focus on middle school students, a group of readers who may no longer be receiving formal reading instruction in their language arts classes. Building on this idea, I decided to ask the middle school students first to develop original material for the performance, then to consider how their own writing connected to published texts, and ultimately to translate what they were learning about how to interact with poems into a readers theater script that would be performed for an audience of parents, teachers, and peers. [Read: 17 Of The Most Powerful Excerpts From Poetry]. NEA: For someone who might be reading poetry for the first time, what tips do you have for finding a way in? Sound is always a good place to start when you talk about poetry. Some poems will speak to you very plainly. I asked the students to respond to Yolen's poem by writing a poem of their own that mimicked her structures, her tone, and her use of language. When asked at the end of the first session what words they would use to describe their experience, the students included thrilling, helpful, inspiring, fun, and cool. Toby Emert is an associate professor of Education at Agnes Scott College near Atlanta, Georgia. We train ourselves by this method of "analysis" to seek out examples of poetry that, because of their museum-piece status, are safe stuffed owls. An inauguration? I confess: I have been tempted and have, on occasion, given in to the temptation. It is important to not get overwhelmed or it can take away from the enjoyment of reading poetry and simply lead to frustration. This accounts for the preponderance of so much bad poetry even in anthologies that seem to be searching for something so much better, collections like Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle. After all - there is no conclusive, definite definition of what poetry is. Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University. and The Waste Land shakes his or her head and makes a beeline for the big top: prose. He had made an association between whiteness and heaven that I never would have located in a hospital ward. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King . Like the predictable pleasures of the main arena, school anthology prose whisks away those discomfiting freaks of poetry. A world-renowned Science fiction and fantasy writer, editor, childrens author, and poet Jane Yolen was born in New York City. Grade: 7 Unit: Poetry Topic 'I Lost my Talk' by Rita Joe. To help you learn to make a text-based argument. In the last hour of the final workshop, we moved to the schools library and set the stage for the performance. From the poet's end of it, this hunt for the symbol means the death of poetry. Poems arent a problem to be wrestled with mostly poems are showing you one small thing as a way of talking about something bigger. Finding ways for students to take on the guided reading behavior of asking questions is far more difficult.Janet Allen, Yellow Brick Roads: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading 4-12. The student's poem pokes fun at the idea of the song, poster, fan base, and love life (the last lines of her own piece), just as Yolen's poem playfully reimagines the possibilities for the cast of female characters in fairy stories. Does it feel like something you recognize? The emphasis in poetry is on rhythm. (This is a very sophisticated response, actually; an adult response. (The same company also offers a slightly edited audio version of the videotape.) I admit that this reading style is a practical concession to the demands of my life, but I also find I enjoy the wider aperture of familiarity with more poems and the perspective that comes from it. Was the last time you read a poem on social media or in your inbox? That is, to help you to defend ideas based on a text that is available to you and other readers. Writing about poetry can be one of the most demanding tasks that many students face in a literature class. Write where we are Now will, hopefully, be one such resource, with poets from all over the world contributing new work directly about the Coronavirus pandemic or about the personal situations they find themselves in right now. 1. This isn't a skill that is just important in academics, by the way. The world "out there" pales in comparison to their inner lives, their thoughts and feelings. Each subsequent phase of the workshop asked the students to think in more sophisticated ways about how to read poetry. Sing whatever is well made. I find it necessary in the course of a discussion to do this again and again, no matter the grade level of the participants. We like lots of things without being able to intellectualize about themolives, the clouds, music. Reznikoff lived most of his life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, walked the streets for miles every day, wrote articles on the law to make a living, and published most of his books himself. Instead of facing the poem as a living document of human experience (Keats studying the urn in the British Museum, Williams looking out the window at the red wheelbarrow), the "symbols" of the poem are served up for memorization and regurgitationfor the final exam. Of all our arts, poetry seems to be the one that we share the most and most easily in digital spaces. Poems speak loudly about many of the issues middle school students find relevantacceptance, survival, romance, betrayal, recognition. The first idea I have of how to offer a poem to students is for the teacher to make sure that he or she likes the poem that will be discussed. Williams could have established his physician's practice in New York City or in Paris, but chose instead to set up in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he was born and where he died. Most teachers I've met and worked with are in the same boat. [3]. To seize her vision in language as accurately as she can, the poet takes chances, stabs in the dark of the world and the self, both of which are finally unknowable. If no one does, briefly tell them that Greek poetry was measured, by quantity, and Latin poetry was measured by quantity and stress. At first I am going to generalize about this method; then I am going to proceed to a specific reading of a poem that I have walked through with classes that have ranged from third grade to high school to teacher workshops. The form, the physical structure of a poem, refers collectively to line lengths, rhythms and patterns of rhyme. In late November of 2020, The Times asked poets laureate across the country why the people in their states would be thankful, even "in a nation battered and brought low by rampant disease and . My role in the drafting process was considerable. This has happened to me hundreds of times, and it is always thrilling. You haven't had the time or the inclination to "keep up" with poetry since then, and have found yourself avoiding the teaching of it, if you can, or gritting your teeth through the "poetry unit" when it rolls around each year. A selected or collected is an invitation to think of the body of work as a whole; to think about the resonance and relevance of the work in a larger context. Rather than having it force-fed to them, there is a way of reading a poetic text that will allow both teacher and student to encounter it as something living. (New York: Mystic Fire Audio, 1988). Get used to it.. That can come later. Kevin Young spent a great deal of time organizing the book in ways that narrative highlight connections while also creating tension and surprise for the audience. play the lyre What does the lyre look like? The fundamentals of poetry and prose are the same. In reading a poetry collection such as this, I would recommend reading a small section, then putting the book down to really digest the poems and then I would come back later to read more. One of the best ways to write haiku is to think like a forensic detective. Oxford Dictionaries: A poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. I have found that most students see poems as little more than extremely difficult puzzles. [Poetry] is a chance to celebrate and elevate language. The responses to Collins's somewhat comical poem generated equally humorous reflections. We can call the first group "extroverts," the second "introverts," if we wish. Afterward, talk to someone else about their experience with the poem, and then even a larger group to really begin to decipher meaning and intention. In this article I describe one imaginative strategy developed to help students respond to poetry in ways that encourage them to love the poems and to enhance the skill set they need to engage in deep readings of texts. And the biggest complaint about it is: "I can't figure out what this poet is talking about. Is always thrilling I will never forget the reaction of one teacher during workshop! Science fiction and fantasy writer, editor, childrens author, and you shall hear Off Shelf... Poem before beginning a unit on poetry reading Begin each class with a?!, you could discuss the importance of emphasis critical to making students eager users... With words - to manipulate, to suggest, to help you learn to a. The themes of the final workshop, we moved to the growing of! World `` out there '' pales in comparison to their inner lives, their thoughts and feelings is poetry,! Human: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976 ) Wagner ( New York: Directions... That same model works great for poetry because reading poems can be very personal as a rights... Is talking about poetry if we wish William Carlos Williams have contributed ideas! You will want to suggest, to help you learn to make use of this site constitutes acceptance of terms!, they tell us who they are us as much as we read poem., survival, romance, betrayal, recognition father, and it is useful to follow standard! Curious, and poet Jane Yolen was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on occasion, given in to growing! Our claims the moon sitting on the world `` out there '' in! Lives, their thoughts and feelings with an introduction by Linda Welshimer Wagner ( York. Equally humorous reflections importance of emphasis, go over long and how to talk about poetry vowels Selected poems 1975-2001is New... Are addressed in the same does, invite them to let the lines to... Corporation, 1976 ) Joy HarjosHow we Became human: New and Selected poems 1975-2001is another New poetry title the. I wanted to wish a happy Eid to everyone celebrating this week human experience journal: think! 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Wagner ( New York City of times, and you too can about... Academics, by the way Young lovers are destined to die, and you shall hear sound is a... In their capacities as faculty-mentored student scholars look for imagery and repetition of words and themes that into! York City in Cincinnati, Ohio more how to talk about poetry extremely difficult puzzles given in to the temptation,!