Ideally, a teacher who wants to run poetry writing sessions writes it him/herself. Failing this, the teacher should ENJOY poetry, and finds time to read it on a regular basis. It's hard to 'do' poetry if you have no real feeling for it, no familiarity with it. So, if you're starting cold, pick up one or two books of poetry, maybe a good anthology (eg 'The Rattle Bag' ed. by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney) and read a few poems every day. It doesn't take long, and soon you'll be finding poems you like. Reading them aloud will bring them to life. Learn one or two by heart. It's good to collect fragments or poems you cherish in a folder. Some Vachel Lindsay perhaps:
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
This discovery and collecting of poetry is a process that's also very valuable for students. Give them folders (or have them make their own), and ask them to collect poems they like. For this you'll need books of poetry in the classroom or school library of course. But they can also collect lyrics from songs that they like. You might ask them to write brief notes as to why they chose a particular poem or lyric. From time to time, ask students to read something from their folder, and take the folders in to read them through. A feeling for the sound and sense of poetry will grow from this. Once this feeling for poetry is established, the writing of poetry is made a lot more accessible.
Not all your students will have a genuine talent, but they're all capable of writing poems that work, poems in which there's a sense of their own voice and their own way of seeing the world.
There are lots of ways to stimulate students to write poetry. I recommend books published by The Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 5, Union Square, New York, NY 10003. Below are a few techniques you might find useful.
FORMS
A form I've found to be very effective with students is the parallel, or repeated
structure. Here's the second verse of the Lindsay poem quoted above:
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Here's an example of a repeated structure I've found successful with 2nd/3rd graders, where the writing skills are still quite limited:
Fly
I am small
I am small and quick
I am small and quick and buzzy
I am small and quick and buzzy and busy
I am small and quick and buzzy and busy and black
I whiz up and down
and around in the air
I am light as a petal
I am quick as a thought
You'll never catch me 'cos
I am fly
Kids like this form because it SOUNDS like poetry, even though it doesn't rhyme.
It uses a wide range of poetic techniques that it's useful to discuss: repetition,
alliteration, personification, a made-up word, a structural change in the second
verse, and a couple of similes. Give them copies of the poem and talk about
it a bit, then put up (or write up) a list of creatures. Ask them to choose
one and write a poem about it, preferably one they're familiar with. Don't require
them to include all the techniques in the fly poem that you've discussed. Repetition
and personification are probably enough to remember.
Here's another repeated form, one that I've used with older kids. This poem's
by Tommy Hewitt, age 10, from England
The wind
I am the wind
that scatters around in a big angry circle.
I am the wind
I howl and gust and pull autumn leaves off their twigs.
I am the wind
I capsize and shove, and wave, batter and crash.
Feel me
I breeze against your bitter cold cheek.
Feel me
I gust and howl and push and shove
and vibrate the bones in your body.
One of the strengths in this poem is its use of very active verbs.
Repeated phrases can be used for non-nature poems as well. Here's a list I've
found useful:
Who am I?
I remember….
I will tell you….
The silver knight
The bones are red
When the clocks struck midnight
I don't like it when you
Apple green and cherry red
My poem 'Carrots' (to be featured in the children's poetry section in this website) is a light-hearted example of a repeated structure poem. Question and answer poems are an application of this parallel structure that can lead to quite dramatic results:
Konga Fish
What is your name?
Konga
Where do you live?
Down in the donkle deep
Who mad you?
Fear made me
What shape are you?
I am the shape fear makes of me
Hog back bull horns
Fang of tiger
I am serpent
I am shark
I am Konga
What is the secret?
No!
What is the secret?
NO!
WHAT IS THE SECRET?
Where there is no fear
I disappear.
These relatively straightforward structures may, with older students, lead to more sophisticated forms like the villanelle and the sestina.
LOOKING FOR THE DUENDE
I think of the duende as a kind of gypsy version of the Muse. When writing loops
away from the expected and catches fire, then the duende is there.
The trouble is, right brains - the home of the duende - don't score well in
tests, so they get short shrift in most classrooms. The result is that kids
end up lopsided, their capacity for feeling, connectedness, imagination, fantasy,
inventiveness, and wonder all compressed, folded up. As the German poet Rilke
said: "Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie."
Here are some ideas designed to evoke the duende, wriggle free the knotted loops.
THE FURNITURE GAME
This is a wonderful way to introduce metaphor, and to loosen up the thinking.
I found it in a book called 'Does it have to rhyme? by Sandra Brownjohn pub
1980 by Hodder and Stoughton Educational. I quote from her intro:
One person thinks of someone (preferably in the group) but does not say who
it is. The rest of the group must guess the name of the person by asking certain
sorts of questions. As examples: What piece of furniture is this person? What
time of day? What kind of flower? What sort of weather? What animal? What food?
What kind of movie? What article of clothing? What kind of song?
The person who has chosen must answer immediately with whatever comes into his/her
head. The answers will give the clue as to who it is.
This person is a large tom cat sleeping in a sunlit window
She's a soft ripe cherry
She's an old leather couch that draws you in so deep you can't get away
This person is the echoing sound of bells from a distant valley
She's a lullaby you forgot you ever heard
A forest with a single path leading to its heart.
SURREALIST POEMS
You might get a bit uneasy as you read through this section. Don't worry. Give
it a whirl.
There's a wonderful saying by Wallace Stevens that it's useful to bear in mind:
Poetry does not invent, it discovers.
Invented poems have a forced, inorganic feeling, a sense of strain. Discovered
poems, however crazy, feel authentic. Since your students will be unused to
this kind if thinking, initially their poems will often be a combination of
the two.
If you can, collect reproductions of paintings by surrealist painters like Dali
and show them to the students. The basic concept to put across is that poetry
can explore what Robert Pinsky in a recent interview calls 'oceanic opaqueness'
or the sense that there are places to go, landscapes to explore, images to discover,
dreams to tap, that are unexpected to the writer as well as the reader. Here's
a poem I've often used to introduce the feeling of a poem that has evolved its
own sense and pattern:
The man in the black suit
I know all about your secret messages
said the man in the black suit
and I know all about your high jumps
and your internal combustions
and your fly-by-nighters
and your fifty-seven famous ways of saying Yes.
No point in thinking you can get away with that kind of folderol
not while I'm in the neighborhood
Sonny Boy Blue!
Actually I said my name's not...
AND
said the man in the black suit
I know all about your yellow nicknames
and about your lullaby for dead chimneypots
oh yes don't you worry about that
and all the silver steeples you've been chasing
down among the parrot sticks in Dead Man's Holy Gulch.
You and your white Polaroids
you and your bagpipe trousers
you and your
tubes
Oh yes I've had my eye on you for some time now
Mr. Legs in Liquorice.
Actually I said my name's not...
Don't interrupt he said.
Have an almond
Here's another:
Number thirty-three
Down the shiny orange street
a man is running.
There's a long rope attached to his belt
on the other end is a bronze statue
of a giraffe.
Three eyes are watching him
the eye of a storm
the eye of an empty gun
the eye of a one-eyed ticket inspector.
The man runs past number twenty-five
The man runs past number twenty-seven
Number twenty-nine has fallen into the sea
Number thirty-one is an abandoned warehouse
full of crates of plastic dolls crying 'Mama'.
The man takes a chicken out of his pocket
and throws it in the air.
It changes into a pineapple
sprouts a pair of wings
and flies away.
Number thirty-three is the man's home.
The man unlocks the door and walks in.
Everything is as it was twenty years ago.
The man unlocks a cupboard.
He pulls out a sunlit meadow.
The man lies down
in the long grass
and goes to sleep.
The eyes close.
The idea of a walk round a house is a useful one as a stimulus for this kind of writing. Here's a poem by a 10th grade girl from England:
Warped Glass
I enter the house quietly so as to awake no one
Tiptoeing up the banisters
and entering the hall
taking care to avoid the dog
for fear that its bark may swallow me.
In the attic Wendal rocks slowly in his rocking chair
while down below Grandad whittles
carving pools of blood from seemingly innocent wood.
In the schoolroom young Jonah
gives his teacher three of the best for being late
and Mother stands to attention
at the end of the swaying crib.
The clock was humming manically fast in the basement
until Father stared it out.
The silence becomes deadly sharp.
The noise is unbearably loud.
Meanwhile Marilyn, who was being cunningly joyous
Rearranges the light
So the mirror absorbs the increasing tension
cracking under the strain
allowing shards of warped glass to fall to the ceiling.
Becca A. Ion
Other themes: Inside the onion, The secret of secrets, The thin café, What the fisherman caught, At the corner of the street, Black Michael's ancient dream, On the far side of the river.
Surrealist, or duende writing, is an end in itself, but is also an effective loosener. It adds greatly to the material that the student has access to, and frees up the language and the LINE of the poem, the journey it is allowed to take. When a group of students grasps the concept and is willing to step into the unknown, the results can be exhilerating.
Try - for reading - Pablo Neruda and W.S.Merwin.