One of my favorite teaching
units when teaching middle and high school students was The Poetry Unit.
The kids would groan; the poet beaten out of them in elementary
school, what with haikus, and tankas, and diamantes forced upon them by well-meaning
teachers, year after year.
I allayed their fears, promising them I would take their
concerns to heart and maybe teach them something new, something innovative,
something that would change their minds about April is Poetry
Month that would not be too painful.
I started off by brainstorming on the white board everything
everyone knew already about poetry.
“It rhymes.”
“It sometimes doesn’t rhyme.”
“It’s short.”
“It’s sometimes long.”
“It follows conventions.”
“It sometimes breaks conventions and rules.”
And so it went until we had covered the white board with
everything everyone offered. During lulls,
I would ask questions to get more ideas.
“Why do some poems rhyme and others don’t?”
“How does a short poem get its message across?”
“What are some poetic conventions?” and if that didn’t work: “What
are some rules you have seen a poet break?”
When the white board was covered with all of their ideas, I showed
them a quick way to write Poem #1 (and copy notes off the board).
THE FOUND POEM
Take a sheet of paper and
number 1-20, skipping lines in between your numbers.
Copy twenty ideas from
the white board that stand out to you the most.
Maybe they are new ideas or contradicting ideas or ideas that you feel a
need to remember most. At this point just copy twenty ideas, one per line. Copy
them exactly as written on the board.
Do Not Change or Add Anything.
When you are done, double
check that you chose the twenty ideas you want to remember the most about today’s
lesson. Scratch out one you do not want to keep and replace it with one you do
want to keep.
Read your list of twenty.
Reorder them in any fashion
you prefer; renumber the list out in the margin: most important to least, or
least important to most, or mix one of each per line, or short line followed by
a long one, or the reverse, clump together in stanzas, or clumped together in
stanzas but the final line ending each stanza has the most importance.
Remember a poem does NOT
have to rhyme, so have fun with this.
This is your rough draft,
so when you are ready, rewrite (or if working on a laptop, move) your lines
into their new positions, adding spaces between lines or stanzas.
When finished, there
should be twenty “lines.”
Some follow up lessons to
this were lessons on enjambment, refrain, and punctuation, but one look at
their finished products always lend themselves to other ideas.
HAPPY
APRIL IS POETRY MONTH.
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